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SUSAN SONTAG
the French Revolution, that is, on the psychological and political premises
of modern history, but seen through a very modern sensibility, one
equipped with the hindsight afforded by the Nazi concentration camps.
But
M aratJSade
does not lend itself to being formulated as a particular
theory about modern experience. Weiss's play seems to be more about
the range of sensibility that concerns itself with, or is at stake in, the
modern experience, than it is about an argument or an interpretation
of that experience. Weiss does not present ideas as much as he immerses
his audience in them. Intellectual debate is the material of the play, but
it is not its subject or its end. The Charenton setting insures that
this
debate takes place in a constant atmosphere of barely suppressed violence:
all ideas are volatile at this temperature. Again, insanity proves to
be
the most austere (even abstract) and drastic mode of expressing in
theatrical terms the re-enacting of ideas, as members of the cast reliving
the Revolution run amuck and have to be restrained and the cries of
the Parisian mob for liberty are suddenly metamorphosed into the cries
of the patients howling to be let out of the asylum.
Such theater, whose fundamental action is the irrevocable careening
toward extreme states of feeling, can end in only two ways. It can tum
in on itself and become formal, and end in strict
da capo
fashion, with
its own opening lines. Or it can turn outward, breaking the "frame,"
and assault the audience. Ionesco has admitted that he originally en–
visaged his first play,
The Bald Soprano,
ending with a massacre of the
audience; in another version of the same play (which now ends
da capo),
the author was to leap on the stage, and shout imprecations at the
audience till they fled the theater. Brook, or Weiss, or both, have devised
for the end of
MaratJSade
an equivalent of the same hostile gesture
toward the audience. The inmates, that is, the "cast" of Sade's play,
have gone berserk and assaulted the Coulmiers; but this riot-that
is,
the play-is broken off by the entry of the stage manager of the Aldwych
Theater, in modern skirt, sweater, and
gym
shoes. She blows a whistle;
the actors abruptly stop, turn, and face the audience; but when the
audience applauds, the company responds with a slow ominous hand–
clap, drowning out the "free" applause and leaving everyone pretty
uncomfortable.
My own admiration for, and pleasure in,
MaratJSade
is virtually
unqualified. The play that opened in London last August, and will, it's
rumored, soon be seen in New York, is one of the great experiences of
anyone's theater-going lifetime. Yet almost everyone from the daily
reviewers to the most serious critics, have voiced serious reservations
