23 March 2002: Weiss, Marat/Sade
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Directed by Janos Szasz.
A very high energy production of a play — the play — that made Weiss’s reputation in 1964. Christopher Innes, author of the entry on Weiss in the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, says there that the play bridges early surrealist, Kafka-influenced plays and documentary drama, and notes the complexity of the effort represented in its long title: The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Innes adds, “the multilayered action continues the two contrasting poles of twentieth century theatre, Artaud and Brecht, to present conflicting theses of revolution and repression, psychological freedom and social equality in the image of a mad-house world.” (p. 1063) Innes goes on to point out important differences in interpretation in three early mountings: the West Berlin premiere (“the need for compromise and the danger of dictatorship”); Brook’s London production, 1965 (“the extreme individualism of Sade’s position”); and the East German premiere of later that year (“the accuracy of Marat’s arguments on the martyred spokesman of Communist liberation”).
It’s a good lesson in the extent to which directorial vision, clearly realized in the mounting, can almost definitively condition the viewer’s response — sometimes, so fully that there is no discernible difference between the play text and its realization.
Szarsz’s production falls into that category. I haven’t read Geoffrey Skelton’s translation (if indeed it has been published), but in performance it is clear, idiomatic, and quite functional. The scenic surround is truly striking. The stage is an exceptionally deep platform, metal-clad, the two halves canted up at the sides so as to form a shallow “V”. (As I write it occurs to me that this formed a kind of gutter, or channel, down which the blood of victims of the guillotine flowed.) In Act I an enormous black iron cage runs up and down on a track on either side of the center of the gutter; in it, even before the house lights go down and the action begins, are perhaps two dozen inmates of Charenton, in various conditions from fully catatonic trance to uncontrollable mania. Out of it, as the action begins, the chief characters: Sade (Thomas Darrah), Marat (Will Le Bow), Charlotte Corday (Stephanie Roth-Haberle): and a few others. De Sade controls the show: down right, against one of the several I-beams that hold up the frame, the superstructure of the open set, is mounted a large electric box with an on-off handle; Sade announces each scene and throws the handle to the “Up” position, so setting the scene in motion. This basic convention remains in Act II, where the cage has been removed, Marat’s tub (an unusually large, squared off lozenge-shaped affair made, seemingly, of galvanized iron or tin), present on the stage in the down-right quadrant, has been moved to the