Representative plays containing the core of Sartre's literature, a great philosopher
The sum total of Sartre's existentialist thought: "Hell is other people."

A collection of Sartre's plays, including "The Closed Room," which is considered the most successful of Sartre's plays and is still performed around the world today, and "The Devil and the Good God," which is said to be Sartre's most treasured play, has been published in Minumsa's World Literature Collection.


This anthology, which includes two of Sartre's representative plays, "The Closed Room," which vividly shows the author's existentialist proposition that "hell is other people," and "The Devil and the Good God," which explores the relationship between "human" and "absolute" and presents a single "ethics" that will not collapse in a chaotic society and polarized world, can be said to be a must-read that contains the entirety of Sartre's thoughts, a master who led modern French existentialist philosophy and literature.

This is what hell is like.
I really didn't know it would be like this... ... .
You guys remember, sulfur fire, wood fire, grill… … Ah! This is so funny.
You don't even need a grill, hell is other people.
-In the work

A representative existentialist thinker, a pioneer of participatory literature, or a 'great playwright'

Today, Sartre is well known to readers as the novelist who wrote Nausea and the philosopher who wrote Being and Nothingness, and he is more often talked about for his anecdotes such as his refusal of the Nobel Prize in Literature and his arranged marriage with Simone de Beauvoir.
But in fact, it was through plays that Sartre's name became known in earnest in the United States.
The Korean War broke out when existentialist philosophy was just beginning to be introduced in Korea after liberation, and in 1951, when the war was in full swing, the Busan theater company 'Shinhyeop' staged Sartre's play 'Dirty Hands' (1948) under the title 'Red Gloves', which was a huge success.
According to Lee Jin-sun, who directed the performance at the time, "The Red Gloves" was sold out every day, with crowds of spectators crowding outside the theater even during the wartime evacuation, and received favorable reviews in various daily newspapers. (Lee Jin-sun, "Korean Theater History 2," Korean Theater, February 1978, p. 52)

In France, it was actually his plays that made the 'master' Sartre a 'popular' writer.
Sartre composed and performed a play called "Variona" in a prisoner-of-war camp held by the German army in the winter of 1940. After being released from the camp, he began with "A Swarm of Flies" in 1943 and formally published a total of ten plays, including two adaptations, over a period of twenty-three years until 1965.
Furthermore, from 1943, he was the only one in France at the time to raise the issue of 'political theater', and in the 1950s, Sartre's plays were remembered as a genre that comprehensively revealed the core of his ideas, and he came to be evaluated as one of the great playwrights of his time.


However, since the 1960s, Sartre's works have been perceived as plays to be read rather than performed or watched.
It is evaluated that during the period from 1955 to 1965, when Brechtian directing style was dominant, Sartre himself neglected new technical innovations in plays, and at the same time, the metaphysical themes that Sartre dealt with in his plays seemed old-fashioned to the audience at the time.
When political theater briefly revived in France in the wake of the May Revolution of 1968, plays such as "The Devil and the Good God" and "Nekrasov" were re-performed and created a sensation.
And since the 1980s, Sartre's plays have been performed not only in France but also around the world, earning their place as classics as the works of a great philosopher and playwright rather than as political plays.

"The Closed Room," a representative play performed continuously around the world

Written in the fall of 1943, "The Closed Room" is considered the most famous and successful of Sartre's plays.
It was first staged in May 1944 by the then-up-and-coming director Raymond Rouleau, and has been performed continuously in France and around the world ever since.
In 1982, in one American city, no fewer than five different versions of "Closed Room" were performed in one year (two in French and three in English).
This work, which was first published in a literary magazine in March 1944 under the title “Others,” was published by Gallimard in 1945, and according to 2004 statistics, approximately 2.4 million copies have been sold since then.

"The Closed Room," which depicts the conflict of three people trapped in hell, is considered to be the most theatrical yet least participatory of Sartre's works. However, because it is a work closely related to Sartre's philosophy rather than current affairs, it has also received favorable reviews from critics.
At first, the story is set in a basement, trying to escape a long bombing, but soon the theme changes to three main characters trapped in eternal hell, and Camus even rehearsed for the role of Garcin.

"The Closed Room" begins with three souls being led into a place that doesn't look like hell at all by a mysterious figure who appears to be a hotel janitor.
Garcin, a former newspaper reporter, Ines, a former post office worker, and the wealthy Madame Estelle.
The fact that they are deprived of everything, with no windows or exits, only reveals that they are being punished in hell.
As the play progresses, their pasts and the stories of their deaths are revealed through each person's confession, and as their desires and secrets become intertwined and collide, their coexistence in a room with no exit becomes hell itself.
In the end, the three of them reaffirm the proposition expressed through Garcin's mouth that "hell is other people."


"The Closed Room," which is evaluated as a dramatization of Sartre's own painful love (love triangle with Beauvoir), his reaction against the hypocrisy of the immoral bourgeoisie, or the wartime experiences of the French people imprisoned under German occupation, is, above all, evaluated as a theatrical expression of Sartre's philosophy.
In "Being and Nothingness," Sartre's ontological structure of human reality and the meaning of its existence, especially "human being as a substitute being," are realized through theater.
In "Closed Room," the "gaze of others" becomes a tool of hellish punishment, and in a closed space where there is no darkness, dreams, or rest, a place where one is always staring at "me" and stealing "my" existence, that place is "hell."

"The Devil and the Good God," the author's favorite work and the epitome of his thought.

"The Devil and the Good God" is a work that Sartre began writing in early 1951 while writing about Jean Genet.
It is said that he was inspired by Cervantes' play "The Happy Scoundrel" (1615) while teaching theater at a theater company.
In this work, Sartre depicts a protagonist who transforms from a villain to a priest through a bet with God, and who struggles between 'absolute evil' and 'absolute good', set against the backdrop of the 16th-century German Peasant's War.
It was first staged at the Théâtre Antoine in June 1951, directed by Louis Jouvet, and enjoyed great success, running for almost a year until March of the following year.
This work, which is difficult to define as being 'a work for reading or a work for performance,' is considered to be the most open to interpretation among Sartre's plays.


The archbishop, forced to join hands with Goetz, the greatest general who terrorizes all of Germany with his shamelessness and cruelty, struggles with a situation beyond his control.
Goetz betrays his brother and sides with the archbishop, laying siege to the rebellious town of Worms.
Meanwhile, Nastya, who leads the peasant uprising in Worms, murders the bishop, and as he dies, the bishop entrusts the keys to the city gates to the priest Heinrich.
Heinrich goes to Goetz and offers to give him the keys in exchange for saving the priests, and almost simultaneously, Nasty also goes to Goetz and persuades him to enter the city on the side of the poor, who are in the same situation, rather than being a puppet of the rich.
After a theological debate about God's will, Goetz proposes a wager: he will renounce 'evil' and follow 'good'.
However, it is not easy to live a life of obedience to God and devotion to goodness, and in the end, Goetz declares that all his actions come from himself, that God is indifferent to human affairs, and therefore God does not exist.


This work, the first of Sartre's ten historical plays, is set against the backdrop of various figures and events during the German Peasants' War in the early 16th century, but differs significantly from actual historical facts.
Sartre himself repeatedly emphasizes, whenever he has the opportunity, that while it is true that the characters are situated in history, they are not historical figures at all, but purely creative creations.
When “The Devil and the Good God” was published, the Catholic community strongly criticized the work, saying that it attempted to prove the death of God. However, Sartre responded by saying, “If I, a philosopher, had wanted to prove atheism, I would have written a philosophical treatise, not a play, for which no proof is possible.”
He says that what he wanted to express through this work was not a theological message, but rather a political one.


Germany during the Reformation and the Peasant Wars represents the general mood of French society, anxious about the changing world after World War II, and through the conflict between the great and small nobility, the high and low clergy, the bourgeoisie and the peasants in 16th-century Germany, this work captures the chaotic times of the social unrest in 1950s France, the emergence of a polarized world, and the fear of nuclear weapons, and depicts what it means to participate and act in such a situation. The meaning of this work will be no different for us readers living in Korea today in 2013.