Albert Camus (1913–60) was born in French colonial Algeria, the subject of many of his most lyrical essays. He and Jean-Paul Sartre are considered the founders of French Existentialism. During the Nazi occupation of France he risked his life in the resistance, editing the underground magazine Combat. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus, who bore a striking resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, had a developed taste for fast living with respect to both women and cars. He died in a car crash at the age of forty-seven.

Camus’s principal theoretical reflections on tragedy are contained in ‘On the Future of Tragedy’ (FT), a lecture given, appropriately, in Athens in 1955. What makes these reflections of particular interest is that, as well as being a philosopher and novelist, Camus was also a man of the theatre – director, actor and playwright – committed to the potential importance of theatre: ‘The theatre is not a game – that is my conviction’, he wrote in the preface to a collection of four of his plays. ‘On the Future of Tragedy’ thus represents the theoretical reflections of a philosopher who was also a practising playwright, a playwright whose works are to a certain extent ‘theory-driven’.