Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✭
written by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by Kim Collier
The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre,
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
November 11-21, 2009
"Hell is Big Brother"
Having seen two failed productions of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play “No Exit”, I had begun to think that perhaps the play had become outdated and could no longer work on stage. Then along comes director Kim Collier, who has conceived a brilliant solution to the “problems” of the play. Her 2008 production for The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre, now on tour, is simply stunning and is one of the must-see shows in Toronto this year.
As many will know, Sartre’s play presents hell as an infinitely large but shabby hotel where “guests” are ushered into rooms by a Valet, who never answers their questions. In this case three guests arrive. First, the journalist Vincent Cradeau (Andy Thompson), second the secretary Inez Serrano (Laara Sadiq) and third the socialite Estelle Delaunay (Lucia Frangione). How and why each of them died and why they each merited hell as their eternal reward make up their initial conversations. Then then move on to wonder why they three, who had never met before should be chosen to spend all eternity together. The answer to this question is one of Sartre’s most famous statements, “Hell is other people.”
The most difficult aspect of the play to establish on stage is the sense of claustrophobia. In 2003 the Stratford Festival mounted the play on the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre, where the actors had to mime their confinement to combat the stage’s inherent openness. Collier’s solution is to invert the play’s perspective. In Jay Gower Taylor’s spooky set the majority of long playing area in the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in taken up with the office-cum-junk room belonging to the Valet. At the far edge stage left are two walls of of a forbidding-looking concrete chamber with a door with metal bolts. Only the inside of the chamber when we glimpse it looks like a hotel room. When the three guests are ushered into the chamber we lose physical sight of them, however, the room has been equipped with hidden video cameras so that on three screens of the wall of the valet’s office we see each of the three displayed from the shoulders up or in further close-ups. Collier’s unorthodox method has thus found a way to make the space the three inhabit seem so small that the cameras can never get a full-length view of the guests.
Also, additional text written by Jonathon Young who plays the Valet, acknowledges our presence as audience so that the guests‘ plight is intentionally given the tacky spin of so-called “reality” shows like “Big Brother” where an audience is entertained by the unhappiness contrived for others. Thus, Cradeau’s famous statement about “other people” is made to refer not just to his two fellow inmates but to implicate the audience itself. Collier adds yet another layer to this by having the Valet point out to us two semidomes in the ceiling of the auditorium, like those concealing closed-circuit cameras, to suggests that we, too, are under surveillance. So is the Valet himself, who has to communicate with us not by speaking but with words like “Help” written on the backs of the mountain of files on his desk.
The use of video solves some of the play’s other difficulties. The talk of collaborators during the war and of lesbians as “femmes damnées” and the characters’ melodramatic lives dates the piece, but when when the actors in Kirsten McGhie’s impeccable 1940s costumes and makeup are seen on screen, we think of the play more in relation to classic French movies and film noir. Sartre gives the three inmates the strange ability to see in their minds what is happening among the living, specifically the point where their existence is decried or obliterated. On stage it is often difficult for actors to play these scenes without staring off into the distance which they had previously established as a wall. Here, Collier used close-ups to separate the actor from his or her surroundings and suggest more clearly that these visions occur in the characters‘ mind eye.
The performances of all four actors are excellent. Thompson may come across as overheated at times but Frangione shows us the energy Estelle expends in trying to maintain her façade while Saadiq gives us a woman who longer has a façade to maintain. Young brings welcome comedy to the show, rather like Clov in Beckett’s “Endgame”, who perceives despite his slightly dimwitted cheerfulness that he is condemned as much as his guests.
Collier cleverly borrows a theme from Beckett defining hell by endless repetition as in “Play” by having the action recommence with the reappearance of Cradeau and cease just when the Valet pushes him once again into the chamber. Along with Brian Linds’ ominous sound design and John Webber’s expressionist lighting, Collier’s “No Exit” represents the kind of production where all elements combine to produce an immensely powerful effect. No future discussion of this play will be possible now without taking Collier’s invigorating re-imagining of it into account.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Andy Thompson, Jonathon Young and Laara Sadiq. ©Tim Matheson.
2009-11-17
No Exit