When I read Camus' Caligula as a depressed sophomore, I was preoccupied with its central argument: what happens when a man accepts the meaninglessness of life and doggedly follows the logic of that position to its bitter conclusion? Pure logic dictates that if life is meaningless, so is death, and therefore Caligula's deliberately capricious murder of his friends and subjects is, however morbidly, rational. Yet Camus always argues that man must make a commitment to life in the face of the logic of meaninglessness. Why?

Camus answers, because man achieves a nobility, a feeling of exhilaration from recognizing the absurdity of existence and deciding to live a committed life nevertheless. But I suspect there is something phoney about Camus' noble affirmation--it's too conveniently noble; one doubts how real an alternative suicide was for Camus. Director David Wheeler's Caligula, which opened Thursday evening, quite properly emphasizes the agonizing psychological turmoil which precedes strictly logical murdering.

Camus has said that "everything begins with lucid indifference," and in the opening scene Caligula declares, "I am not mad. I have never been so lucid." Yet rather than play Calugula as existential lecturer, Karlen in fact appears a bit mad, like a boy with a whopping identity crisis and an over-powering impulse for self-destruction. When he announces that "people die and they are not happy. Everything is a lie and I want people to live in truth. I will teach them," and spends the rest of the play degrading, insulting and murdering his comrades, Karlen gives the impression it is madness more than method which drives him.

When he shouts, the audience cringes at the distraught intensity of his voice, and when he sobs despairingly, they feel only pity. Where Camus intended Caligula to learn what despair really means, in the body itself, Karlen already knows despair; what he learns is logic, or the logic of logic.

Happily, the force of Wheeler's refreshing interpretation and Karlen's convincing performance is sustained by a mature troupe of supporting players. Barbara Colby is uncannily believable as Caligula's almost worn out but vapidly feminine mistress, and Jerome Raphel appears as strong, conscious and submissive as one could hope Caligula's ex-slave bodyguard to be. Only Joseph Hindy, who plays Caligula's naive, sensitive and ultimately rejected friend, Scipio, seems out of place on this fine stage. His movements are stiff, he slouches, and he swallows too many lines.

The sets and lights of Mahala Woolridge, plain and reserved, are unobtrusively fine. And realizing the financial problems of the non-profit Theatre Company of Boston, one can sympathetically accept the limitations of Mary Shepley's monotonously simple, cheezy costumes. It's a bit harder, however, to dismiss some lousy makeup work, most apparent when Karlen enters looking more like a trick-or-treater than a battered Caligula.

Yet these are minor objections to a stimulating production by a group of professionals who deserve great credit for bringing good theatre to Boston.