I '
PETER WEISS
231
Every director has the right to interpret the subject matter of a play
according to his own point of view. According to his tempennent and
to a great extent, of course, according to his situation in a particular
society he will emphasize one or another of the play's features. For a
director in Western society-in which, on the whole, the concept
of class struggle is viewed as no longer having any bearing on reality,
and in which, in all artistic endeavor, the belief flourishes that our
problems are insoluble anyway and that everything is basically absurd
and
mad~it
will
be
almost natural to let the madhouse atmosphere in
Marat/Sade
predominate.
However, if a director believes that Marxism has not lost its
efficacy and that the central points in the arguments proffered by
Marat (which, of course, in many instances prefigured Marx's theses)
are still pertinent, he will emphasize these statements in the play and
he will use them to allude to the present.
Perhaps one drawback of the play is that it contains so many
theatrical possibilities, which allow a director to give free reign to
his imagination and, coincidentally, to omit discussion of the ideas.
For the playwright, naturally, it is most important that a produc–
tion should express a play's dualism, the ambivalence of its situation
-in
Marat/Sade,
the confrontation of individualism and Socialism/
Collectivism. Someone like Sade knows perfectly 'well that society must
be
altered, and he scourges his rotten society sufficiently for his feeling
to
become evident. Yet he is also enough of a visionary to be able to
imagine what might be the consequences of such a fundamental trans–
formation of society. That is the problem of many socialists today:
they cannot recognize their ideals-ideals which had impelled them
in
the beginning-in the reality of the totalitarian socialist state. They
have not lost faith in these ideals but they are aware that only further
great changes can lead to the realization of what had been their point of
departure, namely, humanism.
In the discussion between Marat and Sade what is right and
what is wrong in their statements was meant to be conspicuous; it was
to be a living discussion, full of doubts and contradictions. Sade
represents one pole, Marat the other. Life in the asylum is only
the backdrop. Uncertainty, corruption and helplessness dominate there.
And those who say yes to everything, whose allegiance is always to
the strongest, are there in the background, with Director Coulmier,
the perennial conformist and toady, in the lead.
So far as I am concerned the essence of the play is not the chaos
