Susan Sontag
MARAT
I
SADE
I
ARTAUD
Theatricality and insanity-the two most potent subjects of
the contemporary theater---'are brilliantly fused in Peter Weiss's ' play,
The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates
of the Asylum at Charentoon under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
The subject is a dramatic performance staged before the audience's eyes;
the scene is a madhouse. The historical facts behind the play are that
in
the insane asylum just outside Paris where Sade was confined by order
of Napoleon for the last eleven years of his life (1803-14), it was the
enlightened policy of \he director, M. Coulmier, to allow Charenton's
inmates to stage the(!,trical productions of their own devising which were
open to the Parisian public. In these circumstances Sade is known
to
have written and put on several plays (all lost), and Weiss's play
ostensibly re-creates such a performance. The year is 1808 and the stage
is the stark tiled bathhouse of the asylum.
Theatricality permeates Weiss's cunning play in a peculiarly modem'
sense: most of
M arat
/
Sade
(as it's called for short) consists of a play–
within-a-play. In Peter Brook's production, which opened in London
last August, the aged, disheveled, flabby Sade (beautifully acted by
Patrick Magee) sits quietly on the left side of the stage-prompting
(with the aid of a fellow-patient who acts as stage manager and narrator),
supervising, commenting. M. Coulmier, dressed formally and wearing
some sort of honorific red sash, attended
by
his elegantly dressed wife
and daughter, sits throughout the performance on the right side of the
stage. There is also an abundance of theatricality in a more traditional
sense: the emphatic appeal to the senses with spectacle and sound.
A quartet of inmates with string hair and painted faces, wearing colored
sacks and floppy hats, sing sardonic loony songs while the action
described by the songs is mimed; their motley getup contrasts with the
shapeless white tunics and straitjackets, the whey-colored faces of most
of the rest
of
the inmates who act in Sade's passion play
0!l
the French
