After staging Beckett last month, Theatrician’s exploration of human frailty now continues through Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Gyan Manch, July 25). The play opens with a vision of hell, where souls wait to be carted off to the eternal torture chambers ? but, paradoxically, in Sartre’s existential and godless Universe, the torturer never arrives and purgatory is nothing more than a claustrophobic drawing room. Trapped within it, the three souls ? Garcin (Tanaji Dasgupta), Inez (Bornilla Chatterjee) and Estelle (Ronjini Chakravarty) ? are forced to converse and maintain a semblance of sanity.

And that is what the conversation becomes ? polite drawing-room chit-chat. Neither the actors, nor the director, manage to bring out the horrors of surviving in hell, where, according to Garcin, “Hell is other people.” The pain of having to talk on endlessly is never brought home to the audience. Each character has a shameful act to hide and tries to find out why the others have been condemned to live a life in limbo. The sexual suggestiveness is given free reign ? first Inez’s lesbian instincts draw her to to Estelle, and then Garcin tries to win over Estelle.

The acting is pedestrian; Chakravarty is marginally better than the others as the effete, class-conscious Estelle. Soumyak Kanti De Biswas, too, impresses as the valet.