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by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by Jim Warren

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 24-August 29, 2003

"Hell is an Old Hotel"

Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" is one of those plays more read about than seen.  The play is historically important as one of the more succinct expressions of existentialism in drama. Director Jim Warren gives it a straightforward but not particularly engaging production.  Rather than highlighting the aspects of the play that are still modern, the direction and design conspire to seal the play off as a museum piece.

Songs sung by Jimmy Durante and Edith Piaf greet the audience as it enters the Tom Patterson Theatre.  Before the show begins a dapper bellboy removes dustcovers from two ottomans and a pouf on a carpet in a fairly ghastly mixture of colours.  First he escorts in Vincent Cradeau, a journalist, a bit later Inez Serrano, a secretary, and finally a young socialite Estelle Delaunay.  All three have died recently and have never met before.  They are in hell.  But no one expected it to look like a dowdy hotel.   

Where are the thumbscrews, where are the flames, where are the torturers?  Of all their speculations, Inez's idea turns out to be correct.   Everything--the room, their companions for eternity, their preoccupations--has been deliberately planned to give them the maximum pain.

Inez is a lesbian--"one of those women already damned" according to Paul Bowles awkward translation of "femmes damnées".  She can't stand to see the attraction develop between Vincent and Estelle.  Vincent, who was shot by firing squad as a deserter, needs the women to believe he is not a coward.  But they don't oblige him.  Estelle needs to be the centre of attention, but she doesn't want Inez's attention and Vincent can't love her unless she says tells him he is a hero.  Vincent thus concludes in the most famous line of the play that "Hell is other people". 

The themes of eternal waiting, that people's lives are the sum of their acts, that there is no inherent meaning in the world, look forward to the Theatre of the Absurd and Beckett.  But while the characters propound existential ideas, existentialism has not yet influenced the language or structure of the play.  Unlike Beckett's characters, Sartre's coherently discourse on their situation.  Unlike Beckett, Sartre is writing an existential melodrama where characters intentionally hurt each other and yet bewail the horror of their predicament.

Warren's task ought to have been to rethink the play and reveal what is modern about it.  Instead, the music, Sue LePage's 1940s costumes and decor, the dustcovers suggest that the play is set in the past and that the director sees the play more as a product of its time than of any relevance today.   Not only does this run counter to the idea of hell as eternal, but it underlines the aspects of the play that have dated.  Inez's instant sickening at male-female attraction makes her seem a comic stereotype not a tragic figure.  Vincent's explanations of his crisis, of his need to be told he's not a coward, even in the midst of sexual passion, meets with unintended laughter as does his longing to be away from women and among "manly men in shirtsleeves".

As Vincent, Stephen Ouimette is best when the play calls for dry wit as it does at the beginning.  He is not able to make Vincent's visions of the present credible.  Chick Reid benefits from playing the most lucid of the three, Inez.  Reid gives her authority as an ironic commentator on others and herself.  Claire Jullien presents Estelle as an airhead debutante, although Estelle's nymphomania and murder of her child ought suggest that Estelle is much more complex.  Andrew Massingham shows a wry humour as the Bellboy making one wish Sartre had made it a bigger role.

Louise Guinand's lighting of the infernal hotel room is not harsh enough to convey the pain of the sleepless, unblinking eternity the characters complain of.  The normally competent James Binkley has arranged struggles between Vincent and the two women that are so awkward they look ridiculous.  

A theatre festival is an ideal place to present an historically important play like "No Exit".  But to present it as a period piece does no service to the work itself or the audience.  Current events prove only too well that "Hell is other people".  It's too bad that through direction, design or a new translation this production is unable to make this point hit home harder.  Besides, full price for tickets to a show that is only 75 minutes long is a bit steep.  A double bill, say with Beckett's 1963 "Play", also about a man and two women in hell, would have made for a more satisfying evening. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Chick Reid, Andrew Massingham, Claire Jullien and Stephen Ouimette. ©2003 Michael Cooper.