In director Kim Collier’s vision of Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic No Exit, a minor character called the Valet will try to convince the audience that the play is no longer relevant. At least that was Collier’s plan when I spoke to her recently over lunch.

Her radical reinterpretation of No Exit is being produced by Electric Company Theatre and the Virtual Stage. It will run from Saturday (May 3) to May 10 in a space called the Hangar, which is part of the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way campus.

In Sartre’s script, which was first produced in 1944, three characters arrive in a vulgarly decorated antechamber of hell. The journalist Garcin (played here by Andy Thompson) used to humiliate his wife by bringing his sexual conquests into their home. During wartime, he also proved to be a coward. The beautiful Estelle (Lucia Frangione) committed a horrific murder that drove her lover to suicide. And Inez (Laara Sadiq), the man-hating lesbian, seduced her cousin’s wife, setting off a string of nasty deaths.

Collier said that her first thought about the play was: “I’d really like to see those characters alone. I’d like to put them in a room by themselves and figure out how the audience can participate.” In the Hangar, the Valet (Jonathon Young) will escort the three damned characters past the spectators and into a concrete bunker. Audience members will watch their interactions on four screens fed by seven cameras situated inside the bunker.

Besides exploring the interaction of film and theatre, Collier is asking questions about the ongoing relevance of Sartre’s brand of existentialism. No Exit is probably most famous for Garcin’s statement that “Hell is other people,” an expression of Sartre’s notion that, because we need the gaze of others to define us, we will never be free to define ourselves. Without Garcin to reflect her desirability back to her, for instance, Estelle fears that she doesn’t exist. The play also posits the notion that, in the absence of God, the nature of a person’s life is defined entirely through his or her actions.

Will postmodern audiences find Sartre’s ideas as provocative as his postwar audiences did? That’s where the Valet comes in. The play is cyclical, implying that the Valet, like all of the other characters, is doomed to repeat it eternally. But Collier is taking a different approach. “The choice that we’re making right now is that the Valet will be freed from the continuum if the play is no longer a mirror to the audience,” she said. “We currently have an opening monologue for him, which was written by Jonathon. And while he’s delivering it, he’ll be holding up signs, saying things like, ”˜Help. I need your help.’ ”

In this vision, the Valet has overseers that keep tabs on him and the audience. “Currently, we have a spot near the end where it’s almost as if the larger forces who are watching have a shift change,” Collier added, “and the Valet has the opportunity to say what he wants to say, which is essentially that he wants the play not to be relevant because then he’ll be free.”

In our postmodern world, is the idea of personal responsibility still challenging? We continue to do horrible things, but how much do we care? The Valet’s freedom may depend on the answers to these questions.