¹ The play was premièred in Paris, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, in May 1944, with the following cast: Inès, Tania Balachova; Estelle, Gaby Sylvia; Garcin, Michel Vitold. Translated by Stuart Gilbert as No Exit (New York: Vintage Books. A Knopf Inc. 1948).

² ‘Well, let's get on with it…’

³ Produced by Gibe-Pathé in 1947. Director: Jean Delannoy. With Micheline Presle and Marcel Pagliero in the leading roles. Dialogues: J.-P. Sartre and J.-L. Bost. Script: J.-P. Sartre. Published by Nagel (Paris] in 1947.

⁴ ‘Slowly [the hands of the heroes] fall to their sides. Then turning away from each other, they go off in opposite directions.’

⁵ Interview with Sartre, Combat, 15 April 1947. In Contat, Michel & Rybalka, Michel, The Writings of J.-P. Sartre, Vol. I (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).Google Scholar Translated by Richard McCleary, p 602.

⁶ Contat and Rybalka stress that Sartre, who had recognized the importance of the cinema, approached it as a novelist and they judge his scripts to be ‘lamentable failures’. Writings, p. 601.

⁷ I have counted seventy-one autonomous scenes in the script, some of which are merely descriptive. Sixty-six scenes filmed. The only obvious cut is an episode involving Ève's father.

⁸ ‘Each of them will act as torturer of the other two.’ Huis clos, p. 18.

⁹ ‘Les Jeux sont faits?. Just the opposite of an Existentialist play […] On the contrary, Existentialism does not admit that the chips are ever down […] My script is bathed in determinism because I thought that I was allowed to have fun too.’ 29 April 1947. Writings, pp. 163–4.

¹⁰ ‘When we came to realize its existence, it had long since become our chief need.’ Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Words (New York: Fawcett Publication, 1964).Google Scholar Translated by Bernard Frechtman, p. 75 (‘we’ refers to Sartre, then aged seven, and to his mother).

¹¹ ‘The cinema renews the metaphor because it gives life to its words.’ Sartre, Jean-Paul, Écrits de jeunesse, ‘L'apologie sur le cinéma’. Textes rassemblés par M., Contat et M., Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard 1991), p. 395.Google Scholar My translation.

¹² ‘No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap, like all of us. What are the issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue.’ Sartre, , What is Literature (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).Google Scholar Translated by Bernard Frechtman, p. 293.

¹³ See Malachy, Thérèse, La Mort en situation dans le théâtre contemporain (‘Le théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre et la mort signe’) (Paris: Nizet 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁴ For a semiological study of Huis clos, see Michael Issacharoff's ‘L'espace et le regard dans Huis clos’, Le Magazine littéraire, No. 103, September 1975.

¹⁵ See Ubersteld, Anne, Lire le théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, ‘Classiques du peuple’, 1978).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Gouhier, Henri, L'Essence du théâtre (Paris: Éditions Auber-Montaigne, 1968), pp. 23–6.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the stage (Essays in the Semiology of Theatre) (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁸ ‘It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of.’ Huis clos, p. 44.

¹⁹ ‘The hero's freedom seems to distance him from a tragic world in which he would be submitted to crushing forces, but the impressive nature of his freedom, the im-possibility to escape it, the necessity to make a choice, bring in a new fatality no less oppressive.’ Lorris, Robert, Sartre dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1975), p. 332.Google Scholar My translation.

²⁰ ‘Appearance and reality mingle. The cinema depicts men in the middle and conditioned by it. In the theatre it is the opposite.’ Sarte, , Un thëàtre de situations (Paris: Gallimard 1973), p. 86Google Scholar My translation.

²¹ Ibid.

²² ‘The majestic enclosure of the great ritual game [in] the space dedicated to the stage, a centripetal space closed on itself […]. The cinematographic world [on the other hand] suits only the uncertain space, immense and centrifugal.’ André Bazin, ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, in Esprit, June 1951. My translation.

²³ Strangely enough, this aspect has obviously been emphasized according to the wish of the author. When the ‘dead’ want to enter the regent's office, they wait until a living character opens the door.

²⁴ ‘There is no point in starting one's life afresh, if one is unable to change one's attitude […]. In Sartre the difficulty is increased because of the distance between two characters belonging to antagonistic social classes. To bridge such a gap, Ève and Pierre would require an incredible dose of generosity.’ Jeanson, Francis, Sartre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955Google Scholar, Collection Écrivains de toujours), p. 28. My translation.

²⁵ ‘The relation between Pierre and Ève is false from the beginning. They have the feeling that they are made for each other, however in the world in which they have to live this feeling, everything is arranged so that they will always miss each other’. Jeanson, p. 28.

²⁶ ‘The film is a world organized into a story.’ Mitry, Jean, Esthétique Psychologie du cinéma, Tome I, ‘Les structures’ (Paris, Éditions universitaires, 1963), p. 354.Google ScholarMy translation.

²⁷ Note, by the way, that Sartre has taken from his short novel La Chambre (The Room) published in Le Mur (Paris: Gallimard 1939)Google Scholar, the names of Pierre and Ève. The analogy stops there.

²⁸ ‘As an aesthetic document from an already distant period’. Writings, p. 603.