Les Mains sales

The premiere of Les Mains sales took place on 2 April 1948, with André Luguet and François Périer among the cast, at the Théâtre Antoine, directed by Simone Berriau.

The play, Sartre’s major historico-existentialist drama, derives its originality from its particular narrative structure: the action unfolds over two years and is organized in seven tableaux around a flashback. Tableaux I and VII are set in March 1945 and take place during the same evening (from 9 p.m. to midnight), while Tableaux II to VI recount the events of March 1943, two years earlier; the whole is structured around a three-hour narrative, the actual duration of the performance. “In Sartre’s dramatic work, good and evil, the will to resist and the spirit of resignation, heroism (real or performed) and cowardice, victims and executioners, idealists and realists converse and clash throughout plays that borrow from every genre without adopting any of them, indeed subverting them all.” (La Pléiade).

A play of political commitment, Les Mains sales raises the question of idealism: how far must it be pushed? In a Europe divided between the two great powers, subjugated by its own liberators, by the allies it had never stopped calling upon, communist hope collapses under the Soviet yoke, and the democratic illusions of Hugo and Olga are exhausted before the spectacle of triumphant Stalinism.

From the library of Max Brun (bookplate).