Without ever having met before, Garcin, Ines and Estela are condemned to remain eternally locked in the same room, and to find in each other nothing but an infinite source of dissatisfaction. “Hell is other people”, summarises Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the non-realistic nature of the situation suggests that the three characters have died and are in an unusual hell, naturally Sartre wants to talk about the relationships between people in life. What we are – our ‘I’ – has a social dimension; we need others to give us back the image of what we are as if they were a mirror.

In mala voadora’s show, the actors’ movements have been reduced to a diagram. They play their roles realistically, but their bodies don’t follow this convention. They just sit on a three-seater waiting bench and, at scene transitions, change chairs. And they endure the heat of the projectors placed around them, or hanging too close to their heads.