Dirty Hands (French: Les Mains sales) is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was first performed on 2 April 1948 at the Theatre Antoine in Paris, starring François Périer, Marie Olivier and André Luguet. The director was Simone Berriau. A political drama set in the fictional country of Illyria between 1943 and 1945, the story is about the assassination of a leading politician. The play is told mainly in flashback with the killer telling of how he carried out his mission. The killer's identity is established from the beginning, but the question is whether his motivations were political or personal. Thus the play's main theme is not on who did it but on why it was done.
Author
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. He declined the award of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." In the years around the time of his death, however, existentialism declined in French philosophy and was overtaken by structuralism, represented by Levi-Strauss and, one of Sartre's detractors, Michel Foucault.
