by Susan Sontag
[Summer 1964]
“The Primary and most beautiful of Nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times. But this motion is simply the perpetual consequence of crimes; and it is conserved by means of crimes alone.”
SADE
“Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.”
ARTAUD
Marat/Sade/Artaud
THEATRICALITY and insanity—the two most potent subjects of the contemporary theater—are brilliantly fused in Peter Weiss’ play, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton 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 the director, M. Coulmier, to allow Charenton’s inmates to stage theatrical 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’ 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’ cunning play in a peculiarly modern sense: most of Marat/Sade consists of a play-within-a-play. In Peter Brook’s production, which opened in London last August, the aged, disheveled, flabby Sade (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 strait-jackets, the whey-colored faces of most of the rest of the inmates who act in Sade’s passion play on the French Revolution. The verbal action, conducted by Sade, is repeatedly interrupted by brilliant bits of acting-out performed by the lunatics, the most forceful of which is a mass guillotining sequence, in which some inmates make metallic rasping noises, bang together parts of the ingenious set, and pour buckets of paint (blood) down drains, while other madmen gleefully jump into a pit in the center of the stage, leaving their heads piled above stage level, next to the guillotine.
In Brook’s production, insanity proves the most authoritative and sensuous kind of theatricality. Insanity establishes the inflection, the intensity of Marat/Sade, from the opening image of the ghostly inmates who are to act in Sade’s play, crouching in foetal postures or in a catatonic stupor or trembling or performing some obsessive ritual, then stumbling forward to greet the affable M. Coulmier and his family as they enter the stage and mount the platform where they will sit. Insanity is the register of the intensity of the individual performances as well: of Sade, who recites his long speeches with a painful clenched singsong deliberateness; of Marat (acted by Clive Revill), swathed in wet cloths (a treatment for his skin disease) and encased throughout the action in a portable metal bathtub, even in the midst of the most passionate declamation staring straight ahead as though he were already dead; of Charlotte Corday, Marat’s assassin, who is played by a beautiful somnambule who periodically goes blank, forgets her lines, even lies down on the stage and has to be awakened by Sade; of Duperret, the Girondist deputy and lover of Corday, played by a lanky stiff-haired patient, an erotomaniac, who is constantly breaking down in his role of gentleman and lover and lunging lustfully toward the patient playing Corday (in the course of the play, he has to be put in a strait-jacket); of Simone Everard, Marat’s mistress and nurse, played by an almost wholly disabled patient who can barely speak and is limited to jerky idiot movements as she changes Marat’s dressings. Insanity becomes the privileged, most authentic metaphor for passion; or, what’s the same thing in this case, the logical terminus of any strong emotion. Both dream (as in the “Marat’s Nightmare” sequence) and dream-like states must end in violence. Being “calm” amounts to a failure to understand one’s real situation. Thus, the slow-motion staging of Corday’s murder of Marat (history, i.e. theater) is followed by the inmates shouting and singing of the fifteen bloody years since then, and ends with the “cast” assaulting the Coulmiers as they attempt to leave the stage.
It is through its depiction of theatricality and insanity that Weiss’ play is also a play of ideas. The heart of the play is a running debate between Sade, in his chair, and Marat, in his bath, on the meaning of 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 Marat/Sade does not lend itself to being formulated as a particular theory about modern experience. Weiss’ 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 reenacting 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 turn 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 envisaged 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 Marat/Sade 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 handclap, drowning out the “free” applause and leaving everyone pretty uncomfortable.
* * *
My own admiration for, and pleasure in, Marat/Sade 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 about, if not outright dislike for, Brook’s production of Weiss’ play. Why?
Three ready-made ideas seem to me to underlie most caviling at Weiss’ play in Brook’s production of it.
The connection between theater and literature. One ready-made idea: a work of theater is a branch of literature. The truth is, some works of theater may be judged primarily as works of literature, others not.
It is because this is not admitted, or generally understood, that one reads all too frequently the statement that while Marat/Sade is, theatrically, one of the most stunning thing
s anyone has seen on the stage, it’s a “director’s play,” meaning a first-rate production of a second-rate play. A well-known English poet told me he detested the play for this reason: because although he thought it marvelous when he saw it, he knew that if it hadn’t had the benefit of Peter Brook’s production, he wouldn’t have liked it. It’s also reported that the play in Konrad Swinarski’s production last year in West Berlin made nowhere near the striking impression it does in the current production in London.
Granted, Marat/Sade is not the supreme masterpiece of contemporary dramatic literature, but it is scarcely a second-rate play. Considered as a text alone, Marat/Sade is both sound and exciting. It is not the play which is at fault, but a narrow vision of theater which insists on one image of the director—as servant to the writer, bringing out meanings already resident in the text.
After all, to the extent that it is true that Weiss’ text, in Adrian Mitchell’s graceful translation, is enhanced greatly by being joined with Peter Brook’s staging, what of it? Apart from a theater of dialogue (of language) in which the text is primary, there is also a theater of the senses. The first might be called “play,” the second “theater work.” In the case of a pure theater work, the writer who sets down words which are to be spoken by actors and staged by a director loses his primacy. In this case, the “author” or “creator” is, to quote Artaud, none other than “the person who controls the direct handling of the stage.” The director’s art is a material art—an art in which he deals with the bodies of actors, the props, the lights, the music. And what Brook has put together is particularly brilliant and inventive—the rhythm of the staging, the costumes, the ensemble mime scenes. In every detail of the production—one of the most remarkable elements of which is the clangorous tuneful music (by Richard Peaslee) featuring bells, cymbals, and the organ—there is an inexhaustible material inventiveness, a relentless address to the senses. Yet, something about Brook’s sheer virtuosity in stage effects offends. It seems, to most people, to overwhelm the text. But perhaps that’s just the point.
I’m not suggesting that Marat/Sade is simply theater of the senses. Weiss has supplied a complex and highly literate text which demands to be responded to. But Marat/Sade also demands to be taken on the sensory level as well, and only the sheerest prejudice about what theater must be (the prejudice, namely, that a work of theater is to be judged, in the last analysis, as a branch of literature) lies behind the demand that the written, and subsequently spoken, text of a theater work carry the whole play.
The connection between theater and psychology. Another ready-made idea: drama consists of the revelation of character, built on the conflict of realistically credible motives. But the most interesting modern theater is a theater which goes beyond psychology.
Again, to cite Artaud: “We need true action, but without practical consequences. It is not on the social level that the action of theater unfolds. Still less on the ethical and psychological levels.… This obstinacy in making characters talk about feelings, passions, desires, and impulses of a strictly psychological order, in which a single word is to compensate for innumerable gestures, is the reason … the theater has lost its true raison d’être.”
It’s from this point of view, tendentiously formulated by Artaud, that one may properly approach the fact that Weiss has situated his argument in an insane asylum. The fact is that with the exception of the audience-figures on stage—M. Coulmier, who frequently interrupts the performance to remonstrate with Sade, and his wife and daughter, who have no lines—all the characters in the play are mad. But the setting of Marat/Sade does not amount to a statement that the world is insane. Nor is it an instance of a fashionable interest in the psychology of psychopathic behavior. On the contrary, the concern with insanity in art today usually reflects the desire to go beyond psychology. By representing characters with deranged behavior or deranged styles of speech, such dramatists as Pirandello, Genet, Beckett, and Ionesco make it unnecessasy for their characters to embody in their acts or voice in their speech sequential and credible accounts of their motives. Freed from the limitations of what Artaud calls “psychological and dialogue painting of the individual,” the dramatic representation is open to levels of experience which are more heroic, more rich in fantasy, more philosophical. The point applies, of course, not only to the drama. The choice of “insane” behavior as the subject-matter of art is, by now, the virtually classic strategy of modern artists who wish to transcend traditional “realism,” that is, psychology.
Take the scene to which many people particularly objected, in which Sade persuades Charlotte Corday to whip him (Peter Brook has her do it with her hair)—while he, meanwhile, continues to recite, in agonized tones, some point about the Revolution, and the nature of human nature. The purpose of this scene is surely not to inform the audience that, as one critic put it, Sade is “sick, sick, sick”; nor is it fair to reproach Weiss’ Sade, as the same critic does, with “using the theater less to advance an argument than to excite himself.” (Anyway, why not both?) By combining rational or near-rational argument with irrational behavior, Weiss is not inviting the audience to make a judgment on Sade’s character, mental competence, or state of mind. Rather, he is shifting to a kind of theater focused not on characters, but on intense trans-personal emotions borne by characters. He is providing a kind of vicarious emotional experience (in this case, frankly erotic) from which the theater has shied away too long.
Language is used in Marat/Sade primarily as a form of incantation, instead of being limited to the revelation of character and the exchange of ideas. This use of language as incantation is the point of another scene which many who saw the play have found objectionable, upsetting, and gratuitous—the bravura soliloquy of Sade, in which he illustrates the cruelty in the heart of man by relating in excruciating detail the public execution by slow dismemberment of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV.
The connection between theater and ideas. Another ready-made idea: a work of art is to be understood as being “about” or representing or arguing for an “idea.” That being so, an implicit standard for a work of art is the value of the ideas it contains, and whether these are clearly and consistently expressed.
It is only to be expected that Marat/Sade would be subjected to these standards. Weiss’ play, theatrical to its core, is also full of intelligence. It contains discussions of the deepest issues of contemporary morality and history and feeling that put to shame the banalities peddled by such would-be diagnosticians of these issues as Arthur Miller (see his current After the Fall and Incident at Vichy), Friedrich Duerrenmatt (The Visit, The Physicists), and Max Frisch (The Firebugs, Andorra). Yet, there is no doubt that Marat/Sade is intellectually puzzling. Argument is offered, only (seemingly) to be undermined by the context of the play—the insane asylum, and the avowed theatricality of the proceedings. People do seem to represent positions in Weiss’ play. Roughly, Sade represents the claim of the permanence of human nature, in all its vileness, against Marat’s revolutionary fervor and his belief that man can be changed by history. Sade thinks that “the world is made of bodies,” Marat that it is made of forces. Secondary characters, too, have their moments of passionate advocacy: Duperret hails the eventual dawn of freedom, the priest Jacques Roux denounces Napoleon. But Sade and “Marat” are both madmen, each in a different style; “Charlotte Corday” is a sleepwalker, “Duperret” has satyriasis; “Roux” is hysterically violent. Doesn’t this undercut their arguments? And, apart from the question of the context of insanity in which the ideas are presented, there is the device of the play-within-a-play. At one level, the running debate between Sade and Marat, in which the moral and social idealism attributed to Marat is countered by Sade’s trans-moral advocacy of the claims of individual passion, seems a debate between equals. But, on another level, since the fiction of Weiss’ play is that it is Sade’s script which Marat is reciting, presumably Sade carries the argument. One critic goes so far as to say that because Marat
has to double as a puppet in Sade’s psychodrama, and as Sade’s opponent in an evenly matched ideological contest, the debate between them is stillborn. And, lastly, some critics have attacked the play on the grounds of its lack of historical fidelity to the actual views of Marat, Sade, Duperret, and Roux.