✭✭✩✩✩

by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by Yves Saint-Cyr

Theatre Mosaic, Toronto Fringe Festival, Artword Theatre, Toronto

July 6-16, 2000

“A Very Quick Exit”

We seldom get to see the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, although they are still staged in Europe, so I was glad to see the title of his best-known play among the 101 choices for the 12th Annual Toronto Fringe Festival.  Many people have heard the most famous line of the play--“Hell is other people”-- without knowing its source.  The Mosaic Theatre production directed by Yves Saint-Cyr, unfortunately, was below the level of even a good student production, but it did, at least, make clear that the play is still stageworthy and in the right circumstances could be quite entertaining.

The main problem with the production is that once the three new inmates in Hell are introduced, the pace becomes too fast and allows none of the pauses or breathing room necessary for the characters’ new situation to dawn on them or for their various emotional intrigues to develop in anything but an implausibly hectic fashion.  Yet, once I glanced at my watch, I noted that the show came in at barely under the 60-minute limit that the Toronto Fringe Festival imposes on its entrants, making me wonder, as I did last year, whether that limit is too restrictive and leads to only certain types of plays being performed.

Given this time constraint, some of the four actors coped better than others.  Philippe Buckland as the mysterious Valet was the only one not to rush his lines and suggested a just the right suppressed amusement at the consternation of the new arrivals.  Toby Orr as Garcin raced through his lines the fastest with the result that all subtlety was lost, no character was established and no motivation was clear for his various changes of mood.  It came across as all bluster.  Kate Keenen as Inez was generally good but could have delivered her lines with more nuance and created a more complex character.  Of the three principals, Zoe Mugford as Estelle gave the best performance and alone among them found the humour in her lines.  In a few deft gestures she delineated the egocentric fashion-conscious woman hiding a terrible secret.  Her main flaw was that when her voice rose to a shout her words became unintelligible. 

It’s doubtful whether Theatre Mosaic should have tried to stage “No Exit” within the given time limit especially considering how it negatively restricted the acting and direction.  Saint-Cyr took a rather old-fashioned line toward the play emphasizing the melodrama at the expense of the humour.  It seems that a more effective approach today would be to play up the humour present in so much of the first half of the play and to have that gradually give way to a sense of doom.  After all, even these three inmates in Hell come to see the  appropriately infernal sense of humour in how it metes out punishments.  Saint-Cyr did pause long enough to let Inez’s important line to Garcin, “Your life is what you are”, sink in as the key to the play’s meaning. 

Ciaran McEvoy and Mark Cope’s simple but clever set crumbling away at the edges, Shannah Davison’s costumes well contrasting the two women and especially Paul Hardy’s imaginative lighting all worked well together.  I wish the acting styles of the main players could have blended as well. 

It’s amazing how much more economically Beckett’s one-act work “Play” achieves as much as “No Exit” and more without all the unnecessary fuss left over from Realism.  But someone had to stage the idea first and I hope that if another company tries this work, they will give themselves the leisure to give the text the pacing that its many nuances demand.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Zoe Mugford.