Attempting a Singaporean adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit in a Covid-19 World
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play No Exit has been widely regarded as one of the philosopher’s best works. However, no one has attempted, yet, to stage a production of Sartre’s No Exit in Singapore. In this paper, I postulate what it would look like if one were to stage a production of the play that could resonate with Singaporean audiences, and still maintain faithful to the play’s themes. First, I explore the Singaporean landscape against which this play will be staged and assert that such a play is necessary in our current times. From there, I propose some changes to the characteristics of Garcin, Estelle, and Inez and explain why they are necessary for a Singaporean adaptation. I will then showcase my chosen set design. For any changes made to the original play, I will be justifying my choices through rewritten sections of the play, followed by an analysis of the section.
To stage a play in contemporary Singapore, one must first be aware that theatre-making is a difficult trade in Singapore. Strict censorship regulations and having to fulfill state-funding criteria are an everyday affair for stakeholders such as playwrights, actors, directors, stagehands, and more. Yet, it is in this landscape that theatre as social commentary has thrived. According to Terence Chong, Singaporean theatre, particularly English-language theatre, “has generally been examined in tandem with the country’s nation-building trajectory whereby the issues that find their way to the local stage are seen as a broader reflection of the contemporary trends and forces with which society is grappling” (2). He suggests that certain English-language plays have had such significance in the cultural economy of Singapore that they have become “literary signposts for the country’s cultural-political development” (2):
Goh Poh Seng’s The Moon is Less Bright (1964), beyond its Japanese occupation setting, is a marker of an aspiring postcolonial society’s awkward struggle with its colonial legacy; Max Le Blond’s Nurse Angamuthu’s Romance (1981), adapted from Peter Nichols’ National Health, signals the early confidence of an emerging English-educated middle class finding its voice; while Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill (1985) showcases a nation coming to terms with its multicultural, multilingual complexion and so on (Chong 2).
English-language Singaporean theatre, as a site of social commentary, “showed itself to be the single most dynamic and volatile form of cultural expression” in the 1990s (Peterson 3). However, due to the cutthroat nature of the industry, those who run the theatre scene in Singapore tend to occupy the apex of the educational and economic pyramid” (Peterson 4). Yet, Peterson argues, it is in this privileged position within the culture that Singaporean theatre in English is able to showcase the unique intersection of politics, economics, and culture in multicultural, modern Singapore (4). The Singaporean tradition of theatre-making is thus one that holds up as a lens through which we can examine Singapore’s socio-cultural landscape.
Sartre’s No Exit provides his audiences with an existentialist message, that one’s “existence precedes [one’s] essence,” and one is “alone to create his own values,” and that the “universe is devoid of any moral order to guide individuals” (Senejani 17). He explicates this in his play, where the three central characters are stuck in hell in an eternal afterlife for the wrongdoings they committed while they were alive. Also crucial to his play was the idea of inauthenticity, self-deception, or what Sartre calls “bad faith” (Senejani 17). In a pandemic-stricken 2020s Singapore, the premise of this play has become part of reality as families, flatmates, and strangers alike are confined in the same space for an indefinite period of time due to Covid-19 lockdown regulations. In particular, No Exit’s hellscape is highly reminiscent of Singapore’s Circuit Breaker (CB) period from 7 April 2020–1 June 2020 where movement was highly restricted and people were not allowed to leave their homes unless absolutely necessary. The premise of No Exit has, for the first time in history, has become extremely close to home and even realistic. This idea of a real-life hellscape rings truer when reports showed that incidents of domestic violence increased during the CB (Lau) and mental health declined during the extended lockdown (Ho). Though regular, theatre-going people are not likely to be the delusional criminals and sinners Sartre writes about in his play, the main message of having agency over and taking moral responsibility for one’s actions remains. There is seemingly no better time in Singapore history than now to, hence, stage a Singaporean adaptation of No Exit.
Neither creating a “Singaporean version” of a play nor adapting No Exit are novel ideas. From Singaporean theatre companies Wild Rice’s Cinderel-LAH! to Pangdemonium’s Late Company, stories have been re-written and performed with a local twist for contemporary Singaporean audiences. Sometimes even, to much difficulty, as Pangdemonium’s artistic director Adrian Pang stated in an interview that Late Company contained many references that were particular to a Canadian context, and the directors had made the decision to adapt it to a Singapore context (“Pangdemonium”). No Exit has not been spared from such liberties, though these adaptations were more concerned with adapting the play for a more contemporary audience. BBC’s 1964 adaptation featured a “brightly-lit modernist gallery space” (Jones) and Loredana Volpe’s 2017 television movie was set in “a white mirror-less room under the gaze of a security camera” (IMDb), a departure from Sartre’s original idea of “Second Empire furniture” as the hellish room his three characters are stuck in for eternity, and a testament to the timelessness of No Exit that has allowed its story to evolve and resonate with modern audiences.
Characters
To resonate better with the modern Singaporean audience, I propose certain changes to the characters of Garcin, Estelle, and Inez in order to target the social issues that are currently pertinent in Singaporean society. While the characteristics of the characters remain, such as Garcin’s cowardliness, Estelle’s “bad faith,” and Inez’s cruelty, the ways in which they attain such characteristics differ from Sartre’s play, which was written during the German occupation of France. I will explain how their individual characteristics connect to larger issues relevant to the Singaporean audience that is watching them.
To capture Estelle and Garcin’s “bad faith” and Inez’s authenticity in one short section, I have chosen to rewrite the scene where Inez confronts the other two on why they were actually sent to hell:
INEZ: If only each of us had the guts to just say — GARCIN: Say what?
INEZ: Estelle!
ESTELLE: Yes?
INEZ: What did you do? And I mean, why they send you here?
ESTELLE: [quickly]: I have no idea, I haven’t a clue, not in the slightest. In fact, I’m wondering if someone made a ghastly mistake. [To INEZ] Don’t smile. Just think of the sheer number of people who — who become absentees every day. There must be thousands and thousands, and probably they’re sorted out by — by the small fry, you know what I mean. Stupid employees who don’t know their job. So they’re bound to make mistakes sometimes… Stop smiling. [To GARCIN] Why aren’t you speaking? If they made a mistake in my case, they may have done the same to you. [To INEZ] And you, too. Anyway, isn’t it better to think we’ve got here by mistake?
INEZ: So that’s all you have to say lah.
ESTELLE: What else is there to say? I had a gambler for a dad and my mum left us behind, my brother and I had only ourselves to depend on. I was just a kid, and I had to bring him up. When he was in secondary school, people would think that I was his mother. He was a difficult boy and needed all sorts of attention. I wanted my own children, and when an old friend from my primary school, Kim Hock, asked me to marry him, I just did. His name means money and fortune, and he was a nice man, I thought. We had a child I could call my own, a year in. We had a good life together, three of us. I did the best I could for them, but they couldn’t see it. And then I got Covid, and that was the end of my journey. I mean, undoubtedly, it was wrong of me to marry for money. [To GARCIN] Do you think that could be called a sin?
GARCIN: Of course not. [A short silence.] Money makes the world go round. Do you think it’s a crime to do all it takes to survive?
ESTELLE: Of course not. How could I blame a man for wanting to earn a living!
GARCIN: Now, I was working for a big company that paid like shit. They were earning in the hundred billions. The higher-ups sit on their asses and drink cognac for breakfast. I just forged a few signatures here and there, no harm done right? Am I wrong for pinching from people who won’t even miss the money?
ESTELLE [laying her hand on his arm]: Wrong? On the contrary. You were —
INEZ [breaks in ironically]: — a hero! Our country’s Robin Hood! You want to tell us about your wife, Mr. Garcin?
GARCIN: That’s simple. I’d rescued her from village life. [To ESTELLE] I gave her a good life compared to the shit one she had in Vietnam.
ESTELLE [to INEZ]: You see! You see!
INEZ: Ya, I see. [A pause.] Please lah! What’s the point of play-acting, trying to pretend any of us were good, honest people.
ESTELLE [indignantly]: How dare you!
INEZ. Yes, we are criminals — murderers — all three of us. We all led shit lives and were shitty people. Wake up, we’re in hell; they never make mistakes, and people aren’t damned for nothing.
ESTELLE: Stop! For heaven’s sake —
INEZ: In hell! Damned souls — that’s us, all three!
ESTELLE: Keep quiet! I forbid you to use such disgusting words.
INEZ: A damned soul — that’s you, my little plaster saint. And ditto our friend there, the great Robin Hood. We’ve had our fair share of fun, haven’t we? There have been people who died just for us to feel alive — and we laughed in their faces. Condemned to a fate worse than Hungry Ghosts. This is our karma, our price to pay.
GARCIN [raising his fist]: If you don’t shut up right, I’ll…
INEZ [confronting him fearlessly, but with a look of vast surprise]: What? What? [A pause.] Ah, I understand now. I know why they’ve put us three together.
GARCIN: You better watch your words.
INEZ. It’s so simple. So damn simple. Obviously there isn’t anything here to torture us physically — you agree, right? And yet, we’re in hell. And no one else will come here. We’ll stay in this room together, the three of us, forever and ever. . . . There’s someone missing, our official torturer.
GARCIN [sotto voce]: I’d noticed that.
INEZ: It’s obvious what they’re trying to do. It’s the same idea as a hawker centre, you pay, you take your food, you clean up after yourself.
ESTELLE: What do you mean?
INEZ: I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others. [There is a short silence while they digest this information.]
Sartre’s Garcin is callous and cowardly, a man who deserts the army during World War II (22), and blatantly cheats on his wife (14). My conception of a modern Singaporean Garcin would be one that embezzled company funds for his personal gain, only to pin it on someone else when the company underwent investigations. His womanising trait remains, and he blatantly frequents sleazy karaoke bars in his free time, to his wife’s dismay. While Garcin is aware that he is in hell for his cowardliness that cost the freedom of an innocent man, in front of the two women, he exhibits “bad faith” when he uses the narrative that he was simply taking money from people who would not miss it to cover for his real crimes. Furthermore, Garcin’s callousness for women is shown through his casual expressions of domination over his wife. His inflated sense of self-worth and saviour complex is evidenced by his clear disregard for her roots, stating instead that he “saved her from village life” when talking about his mail-order bride. Mail-order brides are a modern phenomenon in Singapore, which Aware suggests is a reaction to shifting gender roles in Singapore in recent decades. The rise of assertive and confident women, as Aware suggests, have resulted in more men turning to “docile and submissive wives from developing countries” (1). Hence, my rewritten section suggests that Garcin’s disregard for women stems from his insecurity as a man, which might also explain his cowardliness.
Estelle, in the original play, also exhibits “bad faith,” exemplified when Inez pretends to be a mirror for Estelle and tells her she has a pimple on her face (12). Estelle’s “bad faith” and inauthentic self in that instance causes her to immediately accept someone else’s interpretation of herself, “literally creating her essence” for her (Senejani 23). In my adaptation, Estelle retains her “bad faith.” Instead of literally killing her child and driving her lover to death, she tortures both her child and her husband into suicide. Her child, a youth taking the Primary School Leaving Examinations before his untimely death, was ultimately driven to his death because of his mother’s suffocating expectations and controlling nature. He jumps out of their apartment window to his death one day, followed shortly by his father who could not bear to see his son dead, undoubtedly at the hands of his wife. This is a direct allusion to the increasing number of youth suicides in recent years, caused by parents who think of themselves as doing their best for their children but are ultimately abusive and hurtful (Goh). Estelle’s inability to see her own actions as the root cause of their deaths leads to her delusion and “bad faith.” Her death by Covid-19 is also explicitly stated so as to situate the play in our modern world.
Out of the three characters, my conception of Inez is the most similar to Sartre’s Inez. In Akram Amiri Senejani’s words: “Rather than justify her existence in terms of the person she used to be, asserts her freedom to choose her essence in the present, even though she is in hell. She is the only character in the play intent on confronting both her responsibility and her suffering [sic] an essential step is asserting her existence” (23). Similar to the original, Inez here gets into hell because of her insatiable need to torture people around her. I chose to retain her backstory, where her adulterous affair with her cousin’s lover, Florence, leads to Florence’s torment and the double suicide that ends with their deaths (15). The relevance of Inez’s “love” story is still relevant today, as “poor mental health” and a “greater risk of suicide” in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons are a result of the discriminatory practices of modern Singapore (UPR).
Each character’s traits are also augmented with their relationship to Singlish. Inez’s comfort with her place in hell manifests in the ease with which she code-switches from proper English to Singlish. Estelle’s delusion that she is a mistake in hell manifests in her discomfort with Singlish, similar to her complaint that the colour of the sofas do not match her dress. Her aversion to the local tongue causes her to resort to a formal use of English that comes across even more forceful and awkward when she angrily expresses to Inez, “How dare you!” and “I forbid you.” Garcin, on the other hand, resides in a middle ground between the two, never truly comfortable enough to use common Singlish suffixes “lah” and “ah” though many opportunities present themselves, yet still slipping into a distinctly Singlish sentence structure every now and then, e.g. when he threatens Inez with: “If you don’t shut up right,” a sentence where the addition of “right” is completely redundant.
Set Design
Sartre’s version of hell includes Second Empire furniture, perhaps a critique of the decadent lifestyle led by the bourgeoisie during the time. It has also been said to be a commentary on French economic success during the Second Empire as a facade for its other problems such as political repression, which led to its falling to Prussia in 1870, paralleling the conditions under which France was occupied by Germany in the 1940s when Sartre wrote No Exit.
For our Singaporean adaptation, I chose a modern, maximalist design (Fig. 1) to mimic Sartre’s choice of Second Empire furniture. Maximalism, in its complexity and opposition to minimalism, is an “extreme visual incoherence among its content to the point that nothing can be isolated as a discrete thing, thus preventing the recognition of a whole, which develops from a reduction or compilation into singular unité” (Templeton 22). It is characterised by an indulgent use of patterns and colours, as well as a philosophy of “more is more”. The Second Empire and maximalist set designs are similar in their aesthetic of excess and mishmash of various styles into a picture of excess, although the Second Empire style is known to be more harmonious than the maximalist style. Maximalism as a feature of hell and the characters’ interactions with the furniture, in Singapore’s context, becomes a commentary on the decadent lifestyles led by Singaporean elites while income inequality grows rampant year by year (Raghavan). For example, the scene where Garcin interacts with the maximalist furniture could look like this:
A living room in maximalist style, with various patterns–leopard, zebra, floral, in bright colours– strewn across the sofas, floor tiles, and walls in a disconcerting harmony. A steel sculpture stands on the wooden mantelpiece.
GARCIN: Maximalist style? Well, it’s hard on the eyes, but one should get used to it in time.
VALET: Some do. Some don’t.
GARCIN: Are all the other rooms like this one?
VALET: How could they be? We cater for all sorts: Filipinos and Bangladeshis, for instance. What use would they have for a zebra-fur chair?
GARCIN: And what use do you think I have for one? Do you know who I was? Ah, well, it doesn’t matter. And, to tell the truth, I had quite a habit of living among furniture that I couldn’t appreciate, and in false positions. I’d even come to like it. Thought it looked like what Jeff Bezos would have in his house if he ever became a supervillain — you know the style? — well, that had its points, you know. Bogus in bogus, so to speak.
In this short excerpt, Garcin’s interaction with the maximalist furniture shows his “bad faith” and self-deception. During his life, he lived among furniture that he did not understand or appreciate and were even in “false positions,” a phrase borrowed from Sartre that I took to mean “intentionally wrong furniture placement”. His furniture, like himself, are hollow facades of success and wealth. The phrase, “bogus in bogus,” is also retained from Sartre’s original script, intended to highlight Garcin’s self-awareness that he is the “bogus man,” a facade of his true self, living amidst a bogus furniture style, a facade of excess that conceals his moral impoverishment. How he is the “bogus in bogus” can also serve as an allegory for Singapore, whose clean and incorrupt exterior is the smoke and mirror that distracts international audiences from its mistreatment of low-skilled migrant workers and growing inequality. The replacement of “Chinamen and Indians” from the original to “Filipinos and Bangladeshis” is an obvious gesture towards Singapore’s skewed power relationship with its domestic helpers and construction workers that is reminiscent of colonial masters and their Chinese and Indian servants {“Foreign Workers”). This is especially relevant given the Singapore government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 outbreak in migrant worker dormitories, exposing to the whole nation a truth that has been actively hidden for years — that migrant workers are treated like prisoners and nothing more than statistics in the fast-developing Singapore (Marsh). Finally, Garcin’s joke about having had a living room styled like how a “supervillain Jeff Bezos would” is not just a reference to popular culture, where Bezos’ vast accumulation of wealth and influence has drawn him comparisons to that of a comic book supervillain, but also points to Garcin’s idealisation of a life of decadence.
Conclusion
In this exploration of what staging Sartre’s No Exit in the modern Singaporean landscape would be like, I examined rewritings of the three central characters. In particular, I changed the mechanisms through which Garcin and Estelle exhibit their “bad faith,” in hopes of resonating with a more contemporary audience. My explorations in adapting No Exit have shown me that, while the relevance of specific social issues may come and go, Sartre’s initial examination of “hell is other people” remains a pertinent one. While the inexorable and pessimistic conclusion seems to be that people will continue to torment one another as time passes, Sartre offers one last piece of wisdom: “Life begins on the other side of despair.”
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