This is the Jean-Paul Sartre play with the famous line that could apply to every crowded shopping mall, family celebration, doctor’s waiting room and Post Office queue — “hell is other people”.
But in this 1944 existential drama, the title of which in Frank Hauser’s version translates as “No Way Out”, hell is actually nothing so trivial as a form of rush-hour frustration, but a place of judgment and damnation.
The play was first performed in Paris before the city had been liberated from the Nazis. Luke Kernaghan’s production and Hauser’s revived translation has sexed up Sartre’s original by deploying tango as a form of subversive decadence, and invoking a repressive 1970s Argentina as the context for the story.
The Southwark Playhouse serves Sartre’s vision well, located, as it is, in cavernous vaults just down the road from the London Dungeon. The sinister rumble of trains overhead suggest diabolical machinery and, despite its size, the bare-bricked, windowless space manages to be claustrophobic and airless. In one corner, a closed-circuit monitor stares blankly down. Three tables and chairs denote the number of main protagonists, each of whom enters through a fire door from a place that is out of view except for an eerie glow of hot-poker red.
Sartre actually wrote a fourth character, that of a Valet who leads the damned into their cell. Here he takes the form of a mysterious voice whose owner can only be communicated with via an entry phone. The damned trio consist of Garcin (Miguel Oyarzun), a macho coward whose infidelity destroyed his wife; Ines (Elisa de Grey), a lesbian postal clerk who manipulated a wife into killing her husband; and Estelle (Alexis Terry), a high-society party girl who committed infanticide rather than stop having fun.
I have rarely is ever, seen such a chilling deptiction of eternity
It is not long before the realisation dawns that the torturer who each prisoner has been told to expect, exists in the form of the other two.
And it is not long into this play’s uninterrupted 80 minutes before the lesson about the human condition also
emerges — that despite knowing that each of them has been chosen to torment the other two, a pact of co-operation is impossible. For their nature cannot change — and by extension, nor can ours.
In playing out this lesson there is a fair amount of repetitive, fitfully interesting, conflict expressed by a lot of mutual goading, as well as bursts of tango which inevitably develop into a series of sexual clinches.
But less than convincing is the intended metaphor in which tango, choreographed here by Strictly Come Dancing’s Kele Baker no less, serves as a kind of rebellion in the manner of the clandestine tango clubs in totalitarian Argentina 30 years ago.
For one thing, there seems to be a gap of logic in portraying our nasty little trio as somehow representing Argentina’s “disappeared”, the victims in the “dirty war” waged by President Jorge Videl on his own people. This is a classic case of over-reaching for relevance. The play, first performed under the shadow of the Nazis and imbued with the banality of its evil-doers, is enough.
Take away the politics however, and there is a smouldering fascination about the plight of our carefully mismatched three. They are tormented by glimpses of the lives left behind, although the glimpses they get are lot clearer to them than they are to us. Eva Auster’s projected video design is little more than a watery, unfocused image that takes more energy and concentration to interpret than it is worth.
And as often as not the actors, dressed (and undressed) in 1970s chic, deliver more than a whiff of camp. There are times when it seems that it is not so much a masterpiece written by Europe’s most famous existential philosopher that we are watching, but a continental soap opera populated by the over-sexed.
It is as well, then, that the best is saved until last. There is one context imposed on this play that works superbly well. It is delivered with a quite brilliant use of that TV monitor on which we see replayed snatches of scenes previously played out by the trio. It is a very Big Brother reference. Watching the loop of tape repeat the same scenes again and again, I have rarely, if ever, encountered such a chilling depiction of eternity. Or for that matter such a clear revelation of what Big Brother really is — a never ending form of punishment.
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