NO WAY OUT To 12 September.

London.

NO WAY OUT
by Jean-Paul Sartre translated by Frank Hauser.

Southwark Playhouse Shipwright Yard (corner of Tooley Street/Bermondsey Street) SE1 2TF To 12 September 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 35min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7407 0234.
www.southwark-playhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 August.

Hellish scenario where it takes three to tango.
Hell has certainly gone down in the world, judging by this revival of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 chamber drama Huis Clos. Instead of a hotel room in Second Empire style, there is a bare space (in tune with Southwark Playhouse’s situation under the arches of London Bridge station), where the necessary bronze bust perches incongruously in a large space with only a few bare tables and severe seats.

This is famous as the play saying that “Hell is other people,” something undermined by the statement that the psychological torturing the three characters bring to this afterlife venue is deliberately contrived: they are selected as types who’ll rub each other the wrong way. A lot of people who do a lot less self-absorbed self-analysis get by perfectly well with those around them, so it might be truer to say “Hell is being an existentialist philosopher,” of the Sartre kind.

Alexander McCall Smith’s Morality for Beautiful Girls explains en passant why this might be, and anyway director Luke Kernaghan takes a different line, relating the play to the thousands who disappeared during Argentina’s long pre-Falklands military dictatorship.

It remains hard to see the relevance; the dictatorship’s torture was externally imposed; in the play there is a physical way out as the door opens upon command but the characters decide to stay. Though Argentina’s ‘Disappeared’ might have been deluded into believing they would be released, they remained prisoners until, too often, being drugged and dropped from planes into the ocean.

Yes, tangos were played to drown the screams of the tortured. But that has little to do with the tangos danced here. Nor does the spacious stage, or Inez’ moment amid the audience help an atmosphere which, instead of distant as here, should be cluttered and claustrophobic.

So this adds to the many productions where one element of correspondence between script and production leads to an increasingly confused event. That said, the three performances are competent (Sartre’s minor character, a Valet, is replaced by a cheap intercom). But there are better ways of presenting Huis Clos, and of portraying the political terrors of Argentina.

Garcin: Miguel Oyarson.
Inez: Elisa de Grey.
Estelle: Alexis Terry.

Director: Luke Kernaghan.
Designer: Jess Wiener.
Lighting: Marco Antoni Cifre Quatresols.
Sound: Carolyn Downing.
Multimedia Designer: Eva Auster.
Xhoreographer: Kele Baker.

2009-08-24 00:52:58