Incommunicado
By J.P.Sartre
A play staged by South Shropshire CMHT
Translation and adaptation Mike Elkin, ASW, South Shropshire CMHT
Performed at Ludlow Assembly Rooms on Friday December 15th 2000. Tickets were £2
About
the Play
Three people who could be YOU and ME and THAT person over there. Three
individuals trapped in a hell
of their own making, a hell where time and space no longer count. The
normal ways of measuring out their existence are denied them - or are
they ? Now, even more than in life, they need the other person to tell
them WHO and WHAT they were… and may still become.
A trio of misfits who may no longer move through space, but whose eyes
and mouths are still alive! Perhaps, even now those eyes can be persuaded
to relay what the three want to see? Perhaps at the 25th hour, those mouths
will tell them what they so desperately want to hear? … Or will the dreadful
event finally happen? Will Garcin, Ines and Estelle run headlong into
the brick wall which is called honesty, crying out for the last time in
their existence… "It wasn't my fault !"
Historical
Background
This Existentialist drama was written by Sartre in 1944 and staged for
the first time in Paris in May of that
year, as France prepared itself for liberation from four years of German
occupation and oppression. A coded act of political defiance it may not
have been. It is certain, nevertheless, that the play's remorseless examination
of the tendency of human beings to evade RESPONSIBILITY for their actions
and to deny their essential FREEDOM, must have had special resonance for
the audience of the day. Half a century has elapsed, philosophical fads
have come and gone, but the dilemmas are surely the same … the equation
remains unsolved, but perpetually inviting….. ?
About
the Team
More than twenty people have been involved in this production. The only
coincidences which unite them
are that each one is linked with South Shropshire C.M.H.T., that each
offered his or her own talents for free, and - most importantly - that
each put him or herself on the line, however scary that might have been.
It is best that
the abbreviation 'C.M.H.T.' remains untranslated, since to decode it would
mean talking
of Health and Sickness, Minds and Bodies, Teams and Individuals and many
other seeming opposites.
And what this group of twenty plus really want to say - through the medium
of this play - is that for the six
months they spent PRODUCING it and for the one night they spent PERFORMING
it they were neither
necessarily ILL, nor necessarily WELL - they just WERE … somebody or something
else !
The production
received financial sponsorship from the following, to whom grateful thanks:
Rural Minds (Shropshire)
Shropshire County Council (Social Services)
Shropshire Mental Health Services NHS Trust
Barclays Bank (Ludlow)
Tesco (Ludlow)
HSBC (Ludlow)
The Merchant House (Ludlow)
Special thanks to South Shropshire Day Services, Craven Arms Community Centre