“No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre ranks as one of the classics of the modern theatre. It is a one-act philosophical play by French Nobel Laureate. Jean-Paul Sartre and was first performed in 1944 in Occupied Paris and later published in 1945. Its original French title “Huis clos” is sometimes translated as “In Camera” or “Dead End.”
The play proposes that “hell is other people” –rather than a state created by God. The play begins with a Valet ushering three recently deceased people into a room. They are Garci, a revolutionary who betrayed his own cause and wants to be reassured that he is not a coward; Estelle a nymphomaniac who has killed her illegitimate child; and Inez, a predatory lesbian. All the characters require another person for self-definition, yet each one is attracted to the person most likely to discomfort them. Their inability to escape from each other more than guarantees their eternal torture in this “self-service” or as Garcia refers to it “cafeteria” of Hell. Hence, the famous tag line that Sartre delivers through the powerful medium of his play “Hell is other people.”
This production is by turns chilling, darkly funny, erotic and more than compelling as three individuals struggle for “survival” in the Afterlife. The shifting alliances that they form with madly driven passions only succeed in in
sensing the third party who then becomes both voyeur and literally “odd man out” in this infernal “menage a trois.”