Hell is ...

Remember, remember, the fifth of November …

If I were in the UK, I would have spent this evening wrapped up in scarves and gloves, watching fireworks and crowding around a bonfire.

As no such thing exists in Kampala, I instead headed to the am-dram performance of ‘No Exit’ by Jean Paul Sartre.

Sixty years ago or so, Sartre exclaimed that ‘hell is other people’. For the past decade or so, reality shows such as ‘Big Brother’ have confirmed that. In some senses, Hell is a better place than Kampala, since there is a line about the lights never going out, because they have all the electricity they want!

After the performance we sat around and discussed whom we would least like to be stuck in a lift.  It didn’t take us long to decide that, given we were talking about all eternity; even your best friends would drive you to distraction. Trapped on my own for all eternity, I would drive myself mental too! Writers such as Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus, to name a few, have been hailed as being great thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals, regaled for their exploration of the human condition. I don’t think so. Here’s what I think really happened:

One rainy Sunday afternoon, in the dingiest corner of a shabby café on the Left Bank of Paris, Sartre, Beckett, Camus and their cronies gathered for their usual antics. Endless Gauloises were smoked, whilst they tried to impress the waitress by knocking back shots of Absinthe. Several rounds later, real conversation was getting a little tricky, so Jean-Paul (the reputation of being a brooding intellectual misery-guts is totally unfounded) initiated a little drinking game. Previous endeavours include ‘Polovember’ in which participants must wear the same polo neck sweater and oversized coat for the entire month of November. This time, the game was about with whom they would least like to be trapped in a lift. Most folks would have the chat, go home, have a cup of tea, and think no more of it. Not them. They decided to write plays to demonstrate the point. Sartre produced ‘No Exit’, whilst Beckett trumped him by producing not one, but two plays about being trapped with a grumpy old grouch for eternity, hence ‘Endgame’ and “Waiting for Godot’. Conveniently enough, for ones who spent their lives in a red wine and cigarette smoke haze, their plays didn’t really require much of a set or many props, save the odd pair of old boots, a couple of dustbins or a door.

If you would like to write an existentialist play of your own, follow my simple formula.

Characters: Keep it simple – two main protagonists, preferably old, with a few cameo visitors

Plot: Don’t bother. Stop being so conventional, will you? OK, if you insist, two characters bicker and occasionally a visitor will pass by to provoke and antagonise them further

Set and props: Whatever you have lying around – a broken clock will have the critics chirping on about the symbolism of eternity and despair for a while.

Now if you excuse me, I’m off to write an existential play of my own, which will explore human will, subversion, choices and the conformity of society. Once again it’s based on a drinking game and is called ‘Shag, Marry, Shove’!