So there’s this thing from 1964 floating around YouTube, Philip Saville’s production of Jean Paul Sartre‘s No Exit (Huis Clos) for the BBC, retitled In Camera because apparently the British needed something that sounded more like a parking violation than eternal damnation.
Harold Pinter is in it. Not writing it, acting in it. Playing Garcin, this dead coward journalist stuck in a room with two women he can neither fuck nor escape, which is basically Sartre’s entire philosophical project condensed into 90 minutes of claustrophobic studio drama.
Here’s what you need to understand: Philip Saville had two days in the studio. TWO DAYS. And ten days of rehearsal. That’s it. And what does this maniac do? He builds FIVE versions of the same hellish room, each with different walls and ceilings removed so his cameras can get in there like surgical instruments, dissecting these three doomed souls from every conceivable angle. There are shots from below. Shots from directly overhead. There’s this one pan that follows Estelle (Catherine Woodville) as she runs in a circle that makes you feel like you’re trapped in an M.C. Escher nightmare.
The set is minimalist perfection, three benches, three pieces of contemporary art (maybe a Pauline Boty on the wall?), one sculpture after Reg Butler, a paperknife that nobody can use for anything, and a locked door. That’s it. That’s Hell. No fire, no brimstone, just you and two other people and infinite time to contemplate what wretched creatures you all are.
Jane Arden, Saville’s wife at the time, plays Inez, the one who actually gets what’s happening before anyone else. She’s the lesbian who seduced her cousin’s wife and feels approximately zero guilt about it. Pinter delivers “L’enfer, c’est les autres”, “Hell is other people”, with that particular brand of menace he’d later perfect in his own plays, where every pause is a threat and every word is a weapon.
And yes, maybe it’s a bit overwrought. Maybe the philosophical pontification feels a little ridiculous now that we’re fifty years downstream from French existentialism’s peak cultural moment. The Sunday Times critic at the time certainly thought so, sniffing that nothing interesting ever quite happened. But John Russell Taylor got it right when he called Saville “the nearest thing we have, or probably are likely to get, to an Orson Welles of the small screen.”
Because what Saville understood, what Pinter understood playing Garcin, is that Hell isn’t metaphysical. It’s other people’s eyes on you, their judgments, their needs, their inescapable presence. It’s being seen and known and unable to perform your way out of it. It’s being trapped in a room with your own bullshit and two other people who won’t let you get away with it.
The BBC stuck this thing into The Wednesday Play, which was supposed to be about contemporary social drama, not French existentialist theatre. But maybe that’s exactly right. Because what’s more contemporary than being stuck in a room you can’t leave with people you can’t stand, forced to confront the fact that you’re not who you pretended to be?
Two days in the studio. Five versions of Hell. And Harold Pinter staring down the camera with the weight of his character’s cowardice crushing him like a slow-motion avalanche.