No Exit and Three Other Plays Book

Hell is not other people. Hell is any holiday dinner with relatives.

Fashionable in the 50s, and still required reading in prep schools and many colleges, Sartre's play - once ventilated - is a discursive product of Dada and Existentialism mixed with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and a lot of Pernod. In the mid-40s it made him the darling of the boozoisie in Montparnasse. Actually, he was inspired by Wedekind and Strindberg. An interesting thinker, Sarte here overlooks his own contradictions : though each man is his own hell, he states, hell is -- hold on ! -- other people.

With 3 characters, this play is a fav among college drama depts and many regional theatres. The original Broadway production in 1946 was directed x John Huston and had, we're told, a superb set by the artist Frederick Kiesler. It also had an adaptation x Paul Bowles. Others must be avoided. ~ Competing with Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Margaret Rutherford as OWs Lady Bracknell and Ingrid Bergman in a paraphrase of St Joan, it vanished after 4 weeks. But Sartre, the playwright manque, still lingers as he examines our loneliness in a bleak, disinterested world. More importantly, he foreshadows the absurdist work of Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter.