Marat/Sade is the short title of Peter Weiss’s play whose
full name is The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates
of the Asylum of Charenton Under the
Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
The play made
a great stir in 1964 when Peter Brook directed a production in London. Albert
Schultz, Soulpepper’s Artistic Director, has now mounted a credible production
of a confusing play that has a lot of theatricality but falls short on
comprehensible drama.
A
programme note informs us that the play is a “potent stew influenced by
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Kafka’s sense of paranoia, Henry Miller’s jaunty
eroticism, and especially Brecht’s theories.”
That is a
lot of stew to ingest let alone digest and the production for all its brave
attempts at bringing everything forth does not always work.
Schultz
and Set Designer Lorenzo Savoini set the play in a cage. Fair enough, we are in
an asylum. The play is updated to today’s Canada with the asylum of Charenton
being moved to Collins Bay Institution in Kingston. There are some references
to current events and we are treated with a couple verses of O Canada.
The
central figure of the play is Jean-Paul Marat (Stuart Hughes), the French radical
journalist and revolutionary who was assassinated in his bathtub by Charlotte
Corday (Katherine Gauthier). That is dramatic enough but I think his fame rests
more on Jacques-Louis David’s painting The
Death of Marat which was painted shortly after the assassination.
The large
cast goes all over the place with singing and cavorting around the stage. Marat
sits in his bathtub throughout but does stand up occasionally as his
assassination approaches with Corday’s visits.
The Marquis
de Sade (Diego Matamoros) who directs the inmates’ performance sits on the side
on a raised chair and takes relatively little part in the action. Jacques Roux
(Frank Cox-O’Connell), former priest and radical, Marat’s mistress Simonne
Evrard (Deborah Drakeford) and the hormonally overcharged Duperret (Gregory
Prest) take the leading roles. Oliver Dennis plays the Herald who is a sort of
manager and chorus of the inmates.
As the
time for the assassination (and the end of the play) approaches, we see Corday
doing a veritable striptease behind a screen. She moves erotically towards
Marat in the tub and says “I am coming” with an obvious sexual connotation. She
raises the knife to stab Marat and a cast member stops her with a sign that
reads “interruptus.”
Another
actor daubs some red makeup on Marat to indicate blood and the troupe continues
with a song about what happened in the fifteen years following Marat’s death.
This is a good indicator of Brecht’s idea of epic theatre – tell a story
without re-enacting it realistically. There are strange happenings but we are
in an asylum after all.
There are some
effective scenes but on the whole the play rambles without focus for much of
the time.
_________
Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss opened on September 22 and
will run until October 17, 2015 at
the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Tank House
Lane, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca
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