Kosackiewicz played Electra, was not a success, it confirmed Sartre’s
confidence in his ability as a dramaturge. It was produced in a major
Parisian theater thanks to a calculated risk taken by distinguished dir-
ector and head of an acting school, Charles Dullin, in support of an
unknown playwright. During the previous year Sartre had given a
series of lectures to Dullin’s students on Greek drama. This doubtless
facilitated his preparation of the play. So, too, did the rehearsals.
As Sartre would later admit, they “taught me everything I know about
the craft.”^36 For example, Dullin, corrected Sartre’s tendency to write
for the reader rather than for the stage – a criticism that has been leveled
against his plays ever since. “Don’t act the words, act the situation,” was
the director’s sage advice. It became Sartre’s mantra as a playwright.
In retrospect, he admitted that his continued involvement in the theater
hung on this experience. “After the rehearsals ofThe Flies, I never saw
the theater again with the same eyes” (ST 191 ).
As a form of “political” theater, this play could be read as a gloss
on the sense of guilt and remorse that the Pe ́tain regime had tried to
instill in the French population after their country’s military defeat
and occupation. But it also exhibited the prevalence of inauthenticity:
Electra’s failure of nerve in the revenge murder of her mother and
stepfather – and her brother’s costly authenticity: “Orestes will go
onward, unjustifiable, and with no excuse and no right of appeal, alone.
Like a hero. Like all of us.”^37 The language is redolent of Nietzsche with
is fixation on the death of God, and when it has Zeus admitting “the
bitterness of knowing men are free,” one glimpses the existential
“humanism” that Sartre will be propounding in his famous lecture three
years later. “Orestes knows that he is free,” Zeus informs the King, and
he draws the existential humanistic conclusion: “Once freedom lights its
beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him. It’s a matter
between man and man, and it is for other men, and for them only, to let
him go his gait, or to throttle him.”^38
(^36) Jean-Paul Sartre,Sartre on Theater, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Frank
37 Jellinek (New York: Pantheon ,^1976 ),^190 ; hereafterST.
Sartre’s remark on the jacket copy for publication ofLes Mouchesin book form (Paris:
38 Gallimard,^1943 ).
The Flies, act 2 , scene 3 ,inNo Exit and Three Other Plays(New York: Vintage, 1955 ),
103 – 105 ; hereafterFlies.
The FliesandNo Exit 227