No Exit’s fresh hell is diabolically inventive

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      No Exit

      By Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated from the French by Paul Bowles. Additional text by Jonathon Young. Directed by Kim Collier. Produced by the Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre. At the Hangar on the Great Northern Way Campus on Saturday, May 3. Continues until May 10

      Director Kim Collier is a visionary. In this production, she takes Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which is a famous but not a very good play, and turns it into a riveting theatrical event.

      In No Exit, three characters—Cradeau, a vicious womanizer and coward; Estelle, the beauty who committed an unspeakable murder; and Inez, whose penchant for causing suffering has resulted in three deaths, including her own—arrive, escorted by the Valet, in a vulgarly decorated room that is to be their spot in hell. They will be one another’s torturers.

      Rather than putting hell on-stage, in the same overall space as the audience, Collier puts it in a separate concrete bunker within the warehouselike venue. The bunker has cameras in it that feed projectors. We watch gigantic images of the damned as they are thrown, in a constantly changing triptych, on the warehouse’s walls. We also watch the Valet as he scuttles about underneath these images, manipulating—and enjoying—the suffering. He plays music to evoke memories. When Estelle dances in the triptych, he positions himself in front of the projector so that his shadow dances with her.

      It’s fantastic. Collier essentially assigns one frame in the triptych to each of the characters. When one character challenges another, the aggressor invades the victim’s frame. We get close-ups of faces and hands when the characters move closer to the lens. Collier goes from colour to black and white. She doubles and triples images, as if manipulating living Warhol paintings. This combination of theatre and film is invigorating: the performances are live, but the images are huge and intimate.

      Lucia Frangione (Estelle) and Laara Sadiq (Inez) are both superb. Frangione is frail, murderous, and camp. Sadiq takes the role of the stereotypical man-hating lesbian and makes it witty and coolly sophisticated. Andy Thompson’s Cradeau isn’t as subtle, but his work is still solid. And Jonathon Young is unforgettably, gleefully demonic as the Valet.

      Brian Linds provides an excellent soundscape.

      New material that Young wrote for this interpretation questions the play’s contemporary relevance. Young’s writing is strong, but this inquiry undermines the script’s tension. The production is so exciting that the play, though clumsy and dated in itself, feels fresh.

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