No Exit (review)

Israeli theatre in the year 2002 is in an awkward position. Fringe and avant-garde theatre groups are examining the crisis between Israel and Palestine and performing "the situation" as it is existentially termed here. Yet their inability to shock an audience as the daily news effortlessly does, their lack of a perspective on the events, and the escapist indifference that characterizes so many public theatres and audience members have lead to theatre that is political by definition but not by substance. An exception is Avi Gibson Bar-El's production of Sartre's No Exit, under the artistic directorship of Amir Orian, founder of the Room Theatre in Tel Aviv (1987). This staging of Sartre's philosophical play depicting the other as the manifestation of one's personal hell stresses the individual's responsibility for tormenting actions regardless of the role of the other and addresses the senselessness of perpetually blaming the other for "the situation." The production is an intriguing example of relevant postmodern political theatre that combines an Artaudian/Grotowskian total-theatre style with a realistically fourth-wall distancing separation between performers and audience.

The three-hour performance takes place in a very small room-within-a-room, on the third floor of an old house in Tel-Aviv, performed as a ritual only once a week, each time for no more than eighteen spectators. The audience members wait outside the building until an actor in a black suit—the valet—comes to meet them and silently lead four or five spectators at a time to their places in the room on the third floor. Splitting the audience into small groups and having them wait evokes tension and uneasiness. This is especially because Orian's Room Theatre has become known for its intensive performance methods—in a play directed by Orian himself (The Dinner 1985) a woman/performer was beaten, and a real hen was slaughtered.

Climbing the many stairs, one is quite likely to meet real inhabitants of the apartments in the building, but, in addition, the characters of Sartre's play, Garcin (Leon Rosenberg), Inez (Rotem Ziv), and Estelle (Isabelle Markes-Pe'er), one on each floor, lean on a wall and gaze at the spectators. It soon becomes clear that like the audience they are also waiting for the valet to bring them into the theatre/hell, the point at which Sarte's play opens. This seating process casts the anonymous members of the audience as people who, like the characters, are guilty and therefore to be punished for sins they have committed—whether acknowledged or repressed. This straightforward and blunt analogy between the characters and the spectators at the very opening of the performance links the political reality to the philosophical debate of Sartre's characters. Framing the performance with the political statement that hell is literally here—outside the theatre, in the street, on the stairs, and in the room—blurs the borders between the performance and reality. Such a premise also inevitably causes one to speculate, just as the characters do, if "this is what it looks like," and to ask "where are the racks and red-hot pincers and all the other paraphernalia?" By using this minimalist and metatheatrical trick, hell is not conceived merely as a fictional and abstract metaphor, separated from the audience by a proscenium. Rather, as in a medieval mystery play, hell becomes a literal locale, a room. During the performance, however, this sort of interactive didacticism is contradicted by the hyper-realistic performance of the relationships among Sartre's characters.

The design of hell is quite different from the depiction offered by Sartre. Instead of a drawing room in the Second Empire style with a massive bronze ornament on a mantelpiece, the entire performance space is a very small, claustrophobic, and warm room—especially in the hot and humid summer of Tel-Aviv. The room is about ten by thirteen feet, with bare white walls, one door...