Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: A BBC Adaptation Starring Harold Pinter (1964)

Each time I see a ref­er­ence to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis Clos), I think of the night­club scene in Bret Eas­t­on Ellis’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, which is fit­ting since that nov­el is, in a sense, about a group of peo­ple who hate each oth­er. No Exit con­jures Sartre’s famous phrase “Hell is oth­er peo­ple,” but in the play, hell is, more accu­rate­ly, oneself—or the inabil­i­ty to leave one­self, to “take a lit­tle break,” by sleep­ing, turn­ing off the lights, or even blink­ing. Hell, in Sartre’s play, means being end­less­ly con­front­ed with the sor­did triv­i­al­i­ties of one’s self through the eyes of oth­er peo­ple. Trapped in a room with them, to be exact, for­ev­er. It’s a chill­ing con­cept.

In this BBC adap­ta­tion of Sartre’s play, called In Cam­era, cer­tain details have changed. Instead of the “Sec­ond Empire fur­ni­ture” from Sartre’s descrip­tions of the hell­ish room, we have a bright­ly-lit mod­ernist gallery space. The bronze objet d’art in Sartre’s play has been replaced by mas­sive abstract paint­ing and sculp­ture, a com­men­tary, per­haps, on the way the bour­geois space of art gal­leries impos­es arti­fi­cial deco­rum on every­one inside. It’s as incon­gru­ous with the sit­u­a­tion as the haughty draw­ing room of the orig­i­nal. Aside from the mise en scene, In Cam­era is large­ly faith­ful to the dia­logue and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Sartre’s play. Fea­tur­ing absur­dist play­wright Harold Pin­ter as the insuf­fer­able writer and jour­nal­ist Garcin, Jane Arden as Inez, Kather­ine Woodville as Estelle, and Jonathan Hansen as the valet, In Cam­era was part of the BBC series “The Wednes­day Play,” which ran from 1964 to 1970 and pre­sent­ed orig­i­nal work and the occa­sion­al adap­ta­tion. Only the sec­ond episode in the series, In Cam­era ran on Novem­ber 4^th, 1964 and was adapt­ed and direct­ed from Sartre’s orig­i­nal by Philip Sav­ille.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.