Geschlossene Gesellschaft - Burgtheater Wien

Inès, Estelle, and Garcin can only speculate about why they have ended up together in this hell: an interior without windows or mirrors. Towering walls confine them, occasionally visited by a quirky waiter. An outside? There is none here. Even the eyelids have grown weary; the place threatens with continuous wakefulness, without the redeeming "black flashes" of blinking. Why have these three people, who have never met in life, been crammed together here? What guilt has brought them to this place? Do they already hold the torture instruments for the others in their hands, without knowing it? Jean-Paul Sartre's classic of existentialism, premiered in 1944 in Paris under the rule of the National Socialists, is not only a key work for understanding Sartre's philosophy of freedom, which revolves around the question of how the gazes of others define us against our will. "No Exit" is also a play about uncertainty, about being trapped and isolated, about a changed perception of time that weighs heavily over people and things in a present stretched into eternity. In this sense, it has stored valuable knowledge in which we surprisingly find ourselves when looking back on the past years.