There’s a cloying aftertaste to the chocolate-box romance between Albert Camus, the French-Algerian “existentialist” (he disliked the term, though it is said that his novels suggest the opposite), and acclaimed Spanish-French actress María Casares. Their epistolary love story lasted some 16 years, from their meeting in occupied Paris in 1944, and then from 1949 until the end of Camus’ life in 1960. 

Camus was married throughout the affair, and his continual womanising – not just with Casares – stressed out his wife Francine so much that she was driven to attempt suicide. He and Francine were the parents of twins, and it was their extraordinary daughter Catherine who, after her mother’s death in 1979, persuaded Casares to sell her the correspondence with Camus. In 2017, Catherine Camus agreed to have it published, as she believed it of literary and historical value.

These original love letters, postcards, and telegrams fill nearly 1,300 pages. They have been whittled down into a ebullient play starring Jordi Boixaderas as Camus and Rosa Renom as Casares. Yet despite the renown of both actors, the story never delivers much. Perhaps there were only words – and these never intended to be made public. 

Camus was a working-class pied-noir (born in Algeria, a French territory from 1830 until 1962, but of European origin) who suffered from chronic tuberculosis. Casares was the daughter of the former Spanish prime minister Santiago Casares Quiroga, a refugee from Franco. They both felt like outsiders, something they mention often as a source of their bond. Yet as Casares later confessed this was something of a mindset: ”I think that when one is exiled once, it is forever. I became French before I returned to Spain”. The play is set on a stage stacked with objects, suggesting scenes fabricated in correspondence. The two made up imagined shared memories and made plans for the future, identifying and behaving as if they were a couple.

When Camus’ “intellectual sparring partner” Jean-Paul Sartre was asked which of his books he liked best, he said: “The Fall, because Camus has hidden himself in it.” The Fall (1956) is the confession of a celebrated Parisian lawyer who fails to help a drowning woman (a woman that Sartre believed represented Francine Camus). It is perhaps this lofty lawyer that best informs the Camus played by Boixaderas: dignified and fatherly in his waistcoat and blazer, “oblivious” as he nudges his wife closer to the edge. Rosa Renom plays Casares (who was so dramatic an actress that comic roles simply did not fit) girlishly, representing perhaps not just Casares’ relationship with her father, but the other young women at the pointy end of Camus’ penmanship. 

Camus’ relationships were apparently important to him, though his justifications to mess about sound selfish: “It is an error,” he wrote, “to make Don Juan an immoralist … He has the moral code of his sympathies and his antipathies.” Living up to the Don Juan image, in the days before his death, Camus had written to no less than four different women, including Casares, stressing to each his desire to see them.

He kept none of these appointments: driving back to Paris with his publisher Michel Gallimard, their car hit a tree and the 46-year-old Nobel Prize winner was killed instantly. Casares, who had affairs of her own throughout her romance with Camus, only described their well-known affair two decades on. In her 1980 autobiography, Privileged Resident, she wrote: “There is nothing stronger than the things that you want to bury.” Yet she still chose never to quote from their hundreds of letters.