No Exit

Sartre’s creaky existentialist 1944 drama with its famous dictum, ‘Hell is other people’, gets a revival at NVT. Garcin, Inez and Estelle have recently died and discovered themselves to be in hell, where they proceed to emotionally evicerate each other. With its tissue-thin characters (who are merely mouthpieces for the author), wince-inducing dialogue, and a plethora of clunky symbolic tropes, No Exit proved a less than pleasurable experience. The cast and director are to be commended for their sterling efforts, but the play is simply not up to the job: histrionic, simplistic, and frequently plain arch. No Exit runs until 18th May.

New Venture Theatre, 14 May 2013

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