The Theatre Of Cruelty

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30534, 1 September 1964, Page 13

The Theatre Of Cruelty

A dramatic critic of “The Times” reviews Peter Weiss’s play, "The Persecution and Murder of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” at London’s Aldwych Theatre, Reprinted by arrangement.

Arriving in Britain on a tide of discussion from the Continent, . Peter Weiss’s play follows “The Physicists” and “Andorra” as the latest international favourite to sweep through, the festivals and art theatres of Europe. And its equipment is such as to put even its heavy-weight predecessor to shame. Practically every influence currently operating in intellectual high fashion is to be found in the play, Artaud, Kafka, Brecht, Beckett and Sartre all find echoes in it. It is the most ambitious example of the Theatre of cruelty yet to appear: and it manages to function, as a didactic work while resolutely forbidding the audience to draw any lesson. The situation at least is unambiguous enough and based on historical fact of god-given dramatic possibilities. Confined to a lunatic asylum by order of Napoleon, the aged Sade devoted his last years to staging productions of his own works which the inmates performed before the liberal-minded director of the institution and the Parisian public. Mr Weiss recreates one such performance in the bath-house of the asylum. The whey-faced actors, crouching in foetal postures and attitudes of catatonic schizophrenia, stumble forward to welcome the

affable director who enters his box with a pair of fine ladies. It is 1808 and the Revolution is a . thing of the past Sitting motionlessly on the opposite side of the stage is the old philosopher of cruelty who has promised to stage-a therapeutic show for the benefit of the patients. (Mr Weiss makes free use of modem psychological terms when it suits, his purpose.) As it turns out, though, the performance is a good deal more than that Members of the cast reliving the Revolution, run amuck and have to be restrained; Marat, addressing the National Assembly, vilifies public figures who have since been restored to favour; Sade . himself takes an increasingly central part in the action, countering Marat’s revolutionary fervour with his own doctrine of destruction, and addressing the company stripped to the waist as Charlotte. Corday voluptuously flogs him with her hair. Repeatedly the director interrupts. Finally, after a nightmare cavalcade of the 15 bloody years since Marat’s death, the cast goes berserk and assaults its benevolent patrons. And when the audience applaud from the auditorium, the company respond ominously with a slow hand-clap. Basically the content of the play represents the merging of political and psychological action which derives from Europe’s experience of the Nazi death camps. And as such, it is less about the mechanics of revolution than about regimes which lead countries into the equivalent of a pornographic dream. “The world,” says Sade, “is made of bodies”: and his. own status as a political thinker is that, in a criminal society, he

dug the criminal out of himself. From scene to scene, however, the play is shaped so as to prevent one from advancing much farther than that. Its Chines'e-box construction is one cause of this. Marat on one level is presented as a pure politician, whose idealism is not disqualified by the degeneration of the Revolution after his death. But as Sade is supposed to have written his lines, presumably his attacks on Marat, condemning a machine-like society in favour a world of passionate individuals, are intended to carry the argument. Discussion of the multiple references of the play couldbe indefinitely prolonged. And on a first showing one is far less impressed by the intellectual line of the play than its impact on the visceral level which, in Peter Brook’s production, is tremendous. The use of music (by Richard Peaslee) mirroYs the grotesque figures of the actors with harsh bell and organ sonorities, am} set bloodthirsty -events in the idiom of Lully. Surrounding Marat’s bath (a Beckett image straight from history) the Goya-like performers—the anonymous white crowd, a trio of deranged commedia dell’arte singers, and a narrator in a cocked hat (superbly played by lan Richardson)— play with mounting ritual frenzy up to the final murder. Patrick Magee as Sade, a gross physical bulk with the face of a debauched saint, maintains a tortured delicacy which conveys the quality of a mind exclusively inhabiting extreme situations. And Glenda Jackson's Charlotte Corday, a shivering and inviolably private figure—part sacrificial virgin and part mechanical doll—is a performance to haunt the memory.