Theatre Review: No Exit
Hell is Other People: No Exit at the Barron
19/02/24-20/02/24
Directed by Willa Meloth and Annalise Roberts
Written by Jean-Paul Satrre
Produced by Hannah Savage
Reviewed by Callisto Lodwick
One by one, escorted by a shadowy valet, three actors enter a room. None of them will be permitted to leave again. Despite sounding like the bad end to an unfortunate night out, this is the premise of Jean-Paul Satre’s classic drama, No Exit, deftly restaged by Mermaids under the direction of Willa Meloth and Annalise Roberts. Audiences are in for ninety minutes of nail-biting agony, the kind that can only stem from a scorching blend of heartbreak and hatred.
For readers who weren’t keen-eyed enough to pick up from the title, it is swiftly revealed that this is no ordinary room, in no ordinary house, that our protagonists find themselves in. After a few exchanges of eyebrow-raising wordplay that allows the audience the satisfaction of working out the conundrum for themselves, it is revealed that the figures before us are, in fact, in Hell. Their punishment? Eternity with each other. Surely, they all think at first, this can’t be that bad? Yet tensions flare within minutes, until the cast are figuratively and literally at each other’s throats.
The real meat of the play is a neat triptych: two of characters exchange impassioned dialogue, each desperately seeking the impossible from the other, while the third watches on bitterly, relegating to a non-entity. This dramatization of the pain of third-wheeling is where the unique staging truly shines: theatre in the round must be in vogue this season, as this is the second play of the semester to set the actors in the centre of the audience. Each character occupies a single sofa, facing outwards instead of towards each other, and their movements around and onto each other’s spaces masterfully illustrate the power play between them. This fishbowl effect only serves to highlight the claustrophobic nature of the piece: there is no escape for the characters nor the audience. Indeed, I grew increasingly uncomfortable as tensions ratcheted, trapped in a small room watching heinous people do heinous things.
No small part of this miasma of unease is due to an extraordinarily talented cast of actors. Freddie Lawson (Garcin), India Kolb (Inez), and Emily Christaki (Estelle) form a core trio that possess a remarkable gift for making your skin crawl, no matter how sympathetic (or not) their circumstances; Max Fryer completes the cast as a delightfully creepy valet. All three of the primary actors strike a balance between the sad and sadistic that is just horrible enough for you to never quite want to root for them: Lawson’s Garcin perhaps comes the closest to true empathy, especially during a particularly heightened moment when he bombards the door with knocks as he screams to be set free, but Satre is quick to remind you of his depravity only seconds after. Under different circumstances, Inez’s eternal struggle as a gay woman in an unaccepting world might be enough to redeem her, but Kolb plays the character with enough streaks of sadism and manipulation that it’s difficult to feel anything but revulsion towards her. Meanwhile, Estelle’s disarmingly childish demeanour is charming and her nerves endearing (Christaki has the character endlessly wipe her damp hands on her dress—a nice touch), but her final frenzy might just prove her the worst of the lot. In another play, half the fun would be the mindless hatred of these figures, but No Exit isn’t another play: without true love or hatred for these characters, the only thing left is a creeping sense of dread.
The script does drag on, especially as the plot structure (two characters paring up, leaving one fuming on the outside) is basic and the setting remains unchanged: this restlessness isn’t helped by the lack of an interval. Yet the actors perform well under this pressure: they successfully eke the tension up and down to maintain variety, while still building up to a bombastic end. Is it a little predictable? Yes—there are very few shocking twists (at least to a twenty-first century audience familiar with theatre of the absurd). But for fans of watching tensions rise, tempers fray, and sanities slowly unravel, No Exit proves a perfectly disturbing window into how terrible unwanted roommates can truly be.
