No Exit

NO EXIT by Jean-Paul Sartre

Duration and Breaks: 2 hours - no intermission

Translated into German by Traugott König

Inès, Estelle, and Garcin can only speculate why they have ended up together in this particular hell: an interior room without windows and mirrors, walled in like a tower, visited only occasionally by an eccentric waiter. An outside? It doesn’t exist here. Even their eyelids are paralyzed; the place threatens with continuous wakefulness, without the relieving “black flashes” of blinking. Why are these three people, who never met in life, confined together here? What guilt has brought them here? Do they unknowingly already hold the instruments of torture for each other in their hands?

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist classic, first performed in 1944 in Paris under Nazi rule, is not only a key work for understanding Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, which revolves around the question of how the gaze of others defines us against our will. NO EXIT is also a play about uncertainty, confinement, and isolation, about a changed perception of time that stretches into an eternity, weighing down on people and things like lead. In this sense, it holds valuable knowledge in which we surprisingly find ourselves upon reflection on the past years.

We sincerely thank Erwin Wurm and the Erwin Wurm Studio for the loan of the cucumber sculpture, an original piece from the artist’s workshop.

Program and cast

Dörte Lyssewski - Inès Serrano
Regina Fritsch - Estelle Rigault
Tobias Moretti - Joseph Garcin
Christoph Luser - Waiter

Direction: Martin Kušej
Set Design: Martin Zehetgruber
Assistant Set Design: Stephanie Wagner
Costumes: Werner Fritz
Music: Aki Traar
Lighting: Michael Hofer
Dramaturgy: Alexander Kerlin