White Rock-based Peninsula Productions is taking a very different tack with its major staged production for the 2023 summer season.
A dramatically-intense study of three people doomed to spend eternity with each other – with no way out – might not seem typical summer fare.
But No Exit (Aug. 17 to Aug. 27, at Peninsula’s black box studio theatre in Centennial Park, 14600 North Bluff Rd.), directed by company artistic director Mahara Sinclaire, is a justly celebrated theatre piece by French intellectual, philosopher and political activist Jean Paul Sartre – one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism.
First performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris in May 1944 – during the German occupation of France – Huis Clos (or No Exit) presents the audience with three characters who find themselves waiting in a drawing room, perhaps in a hotel, to which they have been ushered by a mysterious bellboy.
As the play progresses, it soon becomes clear that all three are dead – souls damned in the afterlife for their past misdeeds. But the eternal punishment they have been assigned turns out to be quite different from the medieval torture chamber they might have expected.
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This particular room in hell offers a torture that is much more subtle, in that the nature of each of the three distinct personalities inevitably frustrates and aggravates the other two, ultimately to a point of desperation and violence.
Garcin (Christian Bedard) claims that he was executed as a pacifist, while Estelle (Ally Rafter), who feels a compulsion to seduce him, avers she is only in hell by mistake.
But Inez (Sarah Angelle) who is, in turn, intent on seducing Estelle, realizes there is nothing accidental about their fate, and that there is no point in lying about their crimes.
It dawns on all of them that their hell is being forced to spend eternity with each other in a locked room, illustrating Sartre’s famous phrase “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” or “Hell is other people.”
No Exit also illustrates one of Sartre’s central concepts – described in Peninsula promotional material as the “perpetual ontological struggle of seeing oneself as an object, from the viewpoint of another consciousness.”
“I have wanted to do this play for thirty years,” explained actor-director Sinclaire – who Peninsula audiences saw most recently in a tour-de-force performance last year as Anne Hathaway in the one-woman show Shakespeare’s Will.
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“I have been fascinated by the notion that everyone you meet carries a different version of you in their minds, and that the person you think of as your “self,” your true self, exists only for you,” she said.
“Maybe that’s a good thing – it’s certainly interesting.”
In the context of No Exit, she said, the three characters are damned to an eternity together, knowing each other, under the scrutiny of each other, and with full awareness of the nature of each other.
“There is no hiding,” Sinclaire said – and that also pertains to the way she has chosen to stage the play in Peninsula Productions’ intimate studio space.
“We are doing this in the round so that people will actually feel what it is like to have all eyes on them, to be scrutinized, and to participate in that scrutiny – with no intermission, and on a hot summer’s day,” she said.
Bedard, who was raised in Africa, Indonesia and China, moved to Vancouver in 2017. After forays into film and TV, he has latterly focused on theatre.
Rafter, who makes her Peninsula Productions debut with No Exit, has appeared as a comedian in the Unnamed Sketch Show and in dramatic roles in various Lower Mainland theatre productions.
Angelle is an award-winning actor, producer, founder of Lilix Media, and host of Little Gems Cabaret, who believes in communal healing through art and prioritizes works that explore mental health through a contemporary lens.
Also making his Peninsula Productions debut is Tony Shtark, as the bellboy, who was most recently seen locally as Patsy in White Rock Players Club’s Spamalot in 2021.
“We have the most incredibly generous, talented and intelligent actors, participating in this, Sinclaire said.
“They have imbued their characters with Sartre’s deepest meaning,” she added.
“Working with them has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my time in the theatre, and I know the audience will feel their passion, and come away with a sense of having not only been thoroughly entertained, but also moved to a greater understanding of the purpose of theatre – to feel.”
Thursday and Friday shows are at 7 p.m.; weekend shows are 2 p.m. matinees on Saturday and Sunday.
Tickets are available through showpass.com or at 604-536-8335.
alex.browne@peacearchnews.com
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