No Exit and Three Other Plays
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First published in English in 1946, No Exit and Three Other Plays brings together four of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most compelling works for the theatre: No Exit, The Flies, Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute. In No Exit, three dead strangers find themselves imprisoned together in a room where the cruelties of self-knowledge and mutual judgement prove more enduring than physical torment. The Flies reworks the ancient myth of Electra and Orestes into a drama of guilt, liberation and resistance, while Dirty Hands examines the uneasy relationship between political conviction and moral compromise. In The Respectful Prostitute, Sartre turns his attention to racism, power and the machinery of injustice in the American South.
Written during the upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath, these plays reveal Sartre’s gift for making philosophical questions immediate through confrontation, tension and sharply drawn dialogue. Across their very different settings, his characters struggle with freedom, responsibility and the consequences of their choices, exposing the contradictions between private conscience and public action. Together, the collection offers an illuminating introduction to Sartre’s existentialist drama, in which the stage becomes a testing ground for the moral and political dilemmas of modern life.
From the book
“Man is condemned to be free.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays
On No Exit and Three Other Plays
“No doubt Sartre is the most original and the most powerful of the contemporary French dramatists.”
— Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker