Professor David Peimer
The Life and Work of Albert Camus: What Makes him so Insightful for us Today?
Summary
Professor David Peimer discusses the life and work of Albert Camus, focusing on three of his more famous books, The Plague (1947), The Outsider or The Stranger (1942), and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
He worked with a priest and a French Algerian Jewish man and they managed to get 3,000 children out. A whole long story. But if it hadn’t been for him and the others, it wouldn’t have happened.
I think, like with everything, it would be a mix. We certainly want central heating, running water, medicine and many, many things without a doubt. It’s a question of how people are living day-to-day, I think, and what jobs they have and if they have a purpose in their life and are not just mechanical automatons in a way who are then possibly prone to rage and anger and acting in ways which we don’t like.
There’s no hard evidence, but quite a lot of theoretical speculation.