| Existential classic 'no exit' gets a multimedia update |
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| Press |
| Thursday, 24 April 2008 00:00 |
“When your face is going to be six feet tall,a twitch of the mouth could take somebody’s head off"BY MARY FRANCES HILL THE VANCOUVER SUN, APRIL24, 2008.As the philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre noted, hell is other people. This notion, expressed in his one-act play No Exit, has kept its currency, entering the lexicon of popular culture (CSI, Beetlejuice and Futurama have all played with the phrase). Since it was published in 1944, No Exit has returned in countless theatre productions and at least two film adaptations. To Sartre’s audience, this may come as no surprise, as its themes are timeless. No Exit (translated from the French Huis Clos) pits three people — sinners all — in a locked room, bound together for eternity, each forced to face the sins and the demons of the others while ostensibly waiting for a torturer to arrive.
“It picks up on the fascination we have in the present-day media of torture and being nasty with each other. It’s about human nature and how we destroy each other. Sadly, that’s pretty universal,” says actor Lucia Frangione, who stars in the Virtual Stage/Electric Company Theatre co-production of No Exit.
While the script is its one constant, it took the energetic Kim Collier — co-artistic director of Electric Company Theatre, and director of ECT productions The One That Got Away, The Fall, and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands — to add another thematic layer to No Exit. In the Electric Company’s control, the play turns into a meditation on how cinema and live theatre intersect.
Creating a performance space to house a hybrid between film and theatre, Collier set up the spacious hangar at the Centre for Digital Media with a small chamber on one side of the space; standing near its entrance, at the end of a red carpet, is a valet (played by Electric Company co-artistic director Jonathan Young). Six closed-circuit cameras installed in the box capture the players’ slightest move, tick or twitch, and projects them onto four screens via a video mixer, showing the audience various angles at once. In short, the audience will be watching a film of the live-theatre performance before them.
The enclosed actors must pay close attention to the minutiae of their fellow players’ movements. With no room for improvisation, they need to be hyper-aware of how they’re appearing on camera. Such intimate blocking makes for a rigorous rehearsal process, Frangione admits. “When your face is going to be six feet tall, a twitch of the mouth could [look as if it’s going to] take somebody’s head off,” she says. “You have license to be larger and more theatrical, but in some ways you are very restricted in your movement.” The sinners in Sartre’s drama include Estelle (Frangione), a high-society woman who married for money and cheated on her husband; Inez (Laara Sadiq), a lesbian postal clerk who manipulated a woman to turn against her husband, eventually ending in the man’s death; and Garcin (Andy Thompson), a deserter from the army who cheated on his wife. The three come to acquaint themselves and suffer the residual resentment and contempt they feel for each other. They’re waiting for a torturer, but after probing and poking into each other’s weaknesses and insecurities, it doesn’t take long for the trio to clue into who the torturers really are.
Director Collier says she doesn’t envy her actors as they work on negotiating space in such claustrophobic confines. “It’s gruelling,” she says. “These guys have to hit every mark, all over, inside that room. The difference of an inch, or if they have a weight shift from one foot to the other, could mean that they’re falling out of the frame.”
The technical effect of the production offers the feel of early cinema — free of contemporary editing styles and close-ups, full of long shots and artful compositions. “Because I’ve worked in film and theatre, I’m interested in the boundaries between the two, how we relate to the intimacy of film and theatre,” says Collier. “It’s very much live theatre, but we’re not being too filmic, with multiple edits and moving cameras. But it is still theatre in the fact that we’re staging it to the camera. We’re sitting in the middle of both of those mediums.”
If Collier’s imaginative staging is successful, it will be clear to the audience that the actors’ processes — the discomfort of close confines, the pitting of one person’s will against others — mirrors Sartre’s intended message in No Exit.
No stranger to taking theatrical risks, Collier gained a following through Electric Company’s production of The One That Got Away (a play whose setting was underwater in a public pool) and The Score, for which she won Jessie Awards for Outstanding Direction.
“I feel ready to take a greater risk now than I would a few years ago,” Collier reflects. “I feel it’s worth exploring these questions and seeing where we end up. It could be really amazing and fantastic, but there is a chance it could flop.”
No Exit runs May 1-10 in the hangar at the Centre for Digital Media (577 Great Northern Way), 8 p.m. Tickets $15.50-$20 from TicketsTonight.ca 604 684-2787. |
