Watching Paul Hart's fine revival of Jean-Paul Sartre's infernal triangle, I was struck by the play's far-reaching influence. Written in 1943, it not only encapsulates Sartre's existentialist philosophy, but left its indelible mark on Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's hothouse dramas.
Sartre ushers us into a Second Empire drawing room, given a nice air of dusty dilapidation in Lucy Osborne's design, which turns out to be a chamber of hell. Of the room's three occupants, Garcin is a pacifist coward, Ines is a man-hating predator and Estelle is a flighty murderess. Sartre's point is that they are defined by their past actions and that their particular torment is to be chained together for eternity. But he was also at pains to explain, in later years, exactly what he meant by the famous line, "L'enfer, c'est les autres": not that we should cut ourselves off from other people, but that hell lies in our excessive reliance on their judgment.
What is fascinating today, however, is the play's prophetic power: this, you feel, is the crucial signpost to modern drama. Beckett clearly learned a lot from it since it is a play about waiting, about how we create ourselves through particular choices, and even ends with the immobilised characters saying: "Well, let's get on with it." But Sartre adds spice to the situation through a series of sexual power-games, with Ines making a play for Estelle and the latter teasing and tempting Garcin. I was constantly reminded of the claustrophobic contests found throughout the work of Pinter, who played Garcin in a 1964 TV production.
All this comes across in Hart's production, which forms the climax to the Donmar's Whitehall residency: Hart even adopts the Donmar style of using a complex sound-score, created by Tom Mills, that allows the characters to hear echoes of the past as they relive it. Will Keen, edgily dapper as Garcin, expertly hints at the character's mental turmoil by eerily extending the vowels in words like "peer" and "adore" as if reluctant to let go of the sound. Michelle Fairley also avoids the obvious traps in playing Ines by suggesting there is a certain softness under the steel: the moment when she traces a line of lipstick on Estelle's face suggests her tenderness towards other women. And Fiona Glascott as Estelle admirably conveys the sense of a sumptuous society beauty haunted by her deeds. The three actors effortlessly transcend Sartre's occasional resort to sexual stereotypes and remind us why he was the spiritual godfather to so many later dramatists.
