58
FRANK KERMODE
The author is on stage, and frequently intervenes in the performance,
which is given by the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Marat itches in his
bath, the presenter gabbles in bright doggerel interspersed by more or
less topical political cracks. Charlotte Corday, a beautiful melancholic,
nearly gets the job done after five minutes playing time, but there are
various entertainments by the way, including much pretty music and a
chorus which repeatedly asks: "What's the point of a revolution/Without
general copulation?" There are vast charades--a guillotine rattles (luna–
tic drawing an oil funnel across a grating) and thumps (lunatics drop a
heavy table); a bucket of blue blood is poured away. De Sade is fla–
gellated by Charlotte: the lunatics do the hiss of the whip, and she
draws her long hair across his back as he jolts, writhes, and delivers a
grunting philosophical monologue. Weiss was aiming at a cross between
Artaud and Brecht; Peter Brook, we thought, adds a bit of Littlewood.
As mere theater this is a tremendous evening, another work of genius
(yes, I think so) by Brook. Yet the play is really not a good one; it is
Brechtian without Brecht's sense of direction, a play of ideas in which
the play and the ideas are dissociated with a fatal theatrical facility.
When Weiss wants a debate about liberty, personal and political, be–
tween de Sade and Marat, he simply has the presenter or Herald come
in and announce it. The action stops, the lunatics hold their lunatic
poses, and the men talk and talk. A London audience, indifferent to
the pious protests of certain London theatrical people, listened with
obvious but unexcited pleasure. It was pretty typical of the modern
West End audience, sleek again, expensive, professionally hard to shock.
The play has a good ending, the players stonily clapping the audience
out of the theater but then collapsing into all manner of naughtinesses
until an assistant stage manager comes in and blows a whistle. Such
cruelty as there is in the play is calculated on the cruelty of the audience,
and it is not allowed to think of what it has seen as other than as an
illusion. There was nothing that called for criminal proceedings. For
all its revolutionary content M
arat
/
Sade
is strictly for the well-heeled,
the unshockable new men. "We have fed the heart on fantasies,'" re–
marked Yeats; "the heart's grown brutal from the fare."
Mean
would
be the appropriate word, pcrh:lps.
This is called, by custom, a London Letter; but the return to Eng–
land after a year in the U.S. was for me, because of my job, a return to
Manchester rather than to London. We have our own kind of mean–
ness in this vast and ugly North Midlands town; one notices it in the
streets, in the farcically involved traffic, where people would rather
hold you up, even at the expense of being held up themselves, than give
