No Exit

Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society's next production will be the great French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, usually translated in English to No Exit. It will be staged on the first two weekends in November as a dinner theatre production, and offers Kampala audiences something very different to KADS's usual fare.

The plot is simple: three condemned souls are incarcerated in a room in which the essentials of any sort of civilised life are absent - no bathroom, no privacy, no books, no mirrors. Their punishment is to torture each other by picking over each other's lives in an eternal present from which there is no escape. The play's most famous quote is "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) but my own favourite is Garcin's observation that [the three lost souls] "are chasing after each other, round and round, in a vicious circle, like horses on a merry-go-round."

A friend observed yesterday that Sartre's hell is very close to his own idea of hell: a place in which God/Jesus is absent. It's hard to disagree: there is no God and no love in the room - and the natural world is completely closed off - but it also makes me think of the hell of the Big Brother house, where repulsive contestants voluntarily subject themselves to a complete lack of privacy in exchange for the possibility of winning a large cash prize, and, ghouls that we are, we revel in their torments for the vicarious pleasure of not being there with them.

No Exit certainly promises to provide some food for thought (please excuse the pun) for its dining audience in November. It will make challenging and thought-provoking theatre, itself all too absent in KADS' normal round of frothy comedies, feelgood musicals and traditional pantomime.