Theatre de l’Atalante will perform Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) at the Koleso Theater of Kyiv on April 19, 20 and 21. The tour will take place as part of the French Spring program. Incidentally, the two theaters are both located in the capital cities’ cultural and tourist centers, respectively in Kyiv and Paris (the Koleso’s home is Andriivsky Uzviz, while the Theatre de l’Atalante comes from Montmartre). The Theatre de l’Atalante’s head is Alain Alexis Barsacq. This company is more than 32 years old and has a diverse repertoire.
The play No Exit was a programmatic work for Sartre and the French Existentialism (it was written in 1943). The plot has the main characters dying and finding themselves in… Hell. The action takes place in a confined space, a living room with no windows and mirrors. It becomes clear pretty soon that this “room” is located in Hell. The Valet brings three characters there one by one. They remain for a time able to see what is happening on Earth. Only when all events related to their deaths are exhausted do they lose that ability.
The characters suffer from the fact that they were involved in something (error, villainy, betrayal, fornication, tormenting) which cannot be changed since the future is closed for them. They try to avoid being aware of unpleasant facts, but due to the presence of Others nearby, this is impossible. It is through the Other that a person can know themselves, other views give one one’s own reflection... Directors Barsacq and Agathe Alexis show Sartre’s Hell as a quite attractive place, colored by the French charm. The performance’s creators took their audiences through the labyrinths of mind on over a hundred occasions, surprising them with black humor-flavored verbal battles each time.
“The Theatre de l’Atalante’s performance No Exit is only part of a larger joint creative project involving French and Ukrainian theaters,” the Kyivan Koleso Theater’s artistic director Iryna Klishchevska told The Day. “The first phase of this art project will see our Parisian colleagues participating in the French Spring festival. Our theater-goers will see No Exit for the first time. It is an interesting performance, and we are very pleased that the Theatre de l’Atalante’s tour will bring them to our theater’s stage. Incidentally, the Koleso will come to Paris this fall. We plan to show three performances in Montmartre (the Theatre de l’Atalante will lend its stage). I believe that this creative project will be an interesting experience for our company and the French one alike.”
