Electric Company Theatre

by Peter Birnie

The Vancouver Sun, May, 2008.  

Douglas Sirk meets Jean-Paul Sartre in No Exit, a seamless fusion of cinema and theatre that sets a new standard for productions of Sartre’s existential stage classic.  Calling on the colour-drenched, wide-screen world of heightened melodrama infusing one of Sirk’s Hollywood epics, Kim Collier directs a co-production by Electric Company Theatre and The Virtual Stage so filled with innovation that Vancouver’s ever-clever Electricians have set yet another benchmark of brilliance.

In a big industrial space dubbed “The Hanger,” the audience sits in chairs or on mats, facing three big screens in a horizontal row.  In the tight uniform of a hotel bellhop, Jonathon Young enters as The Valet, dragging three reluctant people to a small room and locking them in.

Welcome to hell. 

Cameras come on in the little room, one for each screen, and in enormous projections we meet Estelle (Lucia Frangione), Inez (Laara Sadiq) and Cradeau (Andy Thompson). 

Sartre’s script is a clever compilation of detail, slowly revealing the trio’s individual secrets and the collective reason they’re all trapped in this fuzzy bourgeois parlour of purgatory.  Collier’s electronic interpretation gives even greater impetus to the play’s intellectual examination of self-worth by sending us so completely into that awful, cramped space that there’s a palpable sense of claustrophobia in the air.

Young is with is outside the room, miming the movements of a man trapped in his own existential hell.  As he plays this counterpoint all over the hangar, Sartre’s theme that “hell is just other people” is explored in explosively powerful performances by Frangione, Sadiq, and Thompson. 

No amount of description can do justice what unfolds as lighting and technical director John Webber, working with a creepy sound design by Brian Linds, journeys beyond Sirk to exploit other angles of cinematic study, from desaturated shots in grainy grey to close-ups so extreme that the sight of a big eyeball can induce fear of a Bunuel-style razor blade.  No Exit is a jaw-dropping reminder that Vancouver’s site-specific theatre scene remains a world leader.

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