‘I want to drown the sky in the sea’, screams Caligula, parading arrogantly along a splendidly laid festive table. After the death of his sister Drusilla, who was also his ladylove, the emperor has had the idea of achieving boundless freedom by turning existing standards on their head and torturing, raping and murdering totally at random. He is to be guided in this by logic. He wants to create the world anew and to give his contemporaries the gift of equality, and in so doing heads unremittingly towards his own destruction. The senators whom he pushes ever harder and taunts even until blood flows, are not exactly pleased with Caligula’s radical approach. Caligula in a golden costume Cornelius Obonya puts on a grand show as the insane Caligula. In his golden costume and black gym shoes he is brilliant as the power-crazy and utterly mad Roman emperor; he screams, whispers, rolls his eyes, sweeps everything off the festively laid table at a single stroke and, burning with rage, strangles his senators. In the meantime he wants Helicon (Hermann Schiedleder), a freedman, to bring the moon down from the sky. But Obonya is also a master of the gentler registers, when the human side of Caligula briefly appears and he is plagued by doubts. The emperor is assisted by Caesonia, alias Maria Happel. Blinded by love and obedience, she carries out Caligula’s orders and supports him in his absurd enterprise. She writhes through it all like a snake, trying to flatter and survive. By contrast, the role of Octavia is dubious: throughout the first half, Anneke Bonnema is constantly changing clothes, filming herself with a small handheld camera, and otherwise skipping aimlessly around the banqueting table. After being raped by a gigantic stuffed horse, she is at least allowed to die melodramatically. Jan Lauwers, artist-in-residence at the Burgtheater in Vienna since 2009, has distilled a true feast for the senses out of Camus’ Caligula, with the help of the sound artist Nicolas Field. The action is decently accompanied by an acoustic background. A sound installation consisting of golden cymbals gives the stage setting extra tension and drama at the right moments. In the end the senators dine at the banqueting table and fill themselves with Wiener schnitzels. When Caligula joins them, they leave the room one by one. What remains is a poor, lonely man sitting entirely alone at the table of his life.