Kenneth Haigh, as the emperor Caligula, announces in the first few moments of the play ["Caligula"] … that he is going to be the first ruler ever to "use unlimited power in an unlimited way." He is going to kill whom he likes, ravish what wives he chooses, declare famines on the instant, turn himself into a golden-wigged Venus, try absolutely everything on his unfettered march toward the impossible. He learns, shortly before he plunges from a tower to the knives that finally await him, that when everything is possible, nothing is.

Has Albert Camus' play fallen into precisely the same trap, or is it the current performance that makes the evening seem like the four whirring wheels of a high-powered automobile racing immobile on ice?

Of promised power there is plenty….

Yet there is a treadmill under foot. One crime is really not more shocking than the last...