Realwheels Theatre closes out season with In Camera livestream, September 8 to 11
The free performance marries theatre and cinema, reinterprets Sartre, and features special effects from SFU’s Centre for Digital Media
Pete Graham, Bronwyn Henderson, and Liza Huget in In Camera. Photo by Nico Dicecco
Real Wheels Theatre presents In Camera from September 8 to 11 online
Realwheels Theatre describes In Camera as its most ambitious project of 2021-22. The company’s season-closing livestream—being offered for free—is a new take on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.
While the work is best known as No Exit, Realwheels takes its cues from the play’s original title, which translates as the multiple-entendre “In Camera”, to blur lines between realities. The creative team aspires to capture the original French text as Sartre he might have written today.
Set during the 2020 global pandemic, directed by Shawn Macdonald, and featuring special effects by Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Digital Media, In Camera explores connection, isolation, and human relationships as three characters interact in hell during an online meeting no one can seem to leave. If hell is other people, there’s a fourth character they need to navigate: the virtual meeting platform that has become a global symbol for the real-world COVID-19 lockdown.
“The only way to realize our new vision of the simultaneous subtleties and audacious tonal shifts that are the signature of Sartre’s masterpiece and accurately capture what the playwright and philosopher was really saying in his subversive WWII-epoch script – and how it’s actually proven to be generations ahead of its time – was to return to Sartre’s original French text and start with an all-new translation, adhering as closely as possible to the story, characters, and themes that have been glossed over in many versions,” Realwheels’ artistic director Tomas Mureika says in a release.
Realwheels is a Jessie-winning theatre company that aims deepen audiences’ understanding of the disability experience.
“We’ve all been through quite a lot over these past couple of years,” Mureika says. “Now, with funding from the Canada Council’s ‘Digital Now’ Grant Project and the integrated showcase work of the brilliant CDM Program, Realwheels is able to give this special production as a completely free gift to our audiences.”
For show times and more details, see www.realwheels.ca.
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