Marat/Sade Way Out Front...

Andrew Wilson

Arts Festival Drama was dominated by the single, magnificent performance of Marat/Sade by tne Canterbury Society. It played to a capacity house whose standing ovation lasted at least four minutes. Those who saw Peter Brook's film recently reshown in Wellington will know what a dazzlingly rich play this is in language, music, action and character. Mervyn Thompson's production owed a great deal to the film. But this was no detraction because the performance achieved much more by generating a vital sense of audience involvement.

Before the play began and the audience were still filing in, the asylum inmates were already mooning around onstage. The unfaltering concentration for three hours of these smaller parts (without even the suspicion of a surreptitious glance at the audience) is an indication of the consistent quality of the production. The stage was completely bare—right to the bricks of the back wall—but constantly full of moving people: the asylum patients, guards, nuns, the gaudy newly-rich spectators, the musicians, the quartet of singers; and in the midst of all this delirium, the leading players highlighted when the action demanded it but at other times falling back into the living backdrop. This distracted mass was a constant threat of revolt. From time to time they were worked up into a riot by the roared sanities of the straightjacketed madman Jacques Roux, or by the music and chorus (the theme song for the rest of the festival was "what's the point of a revolution without general copulation"), or by a combination of the whole treatment as when the aroused inmates clambered salivating straight into the audience. If a chill terror did not strike them then, they were not watching the play.

The dialectic between the Marquis de Sade and Marat had a curiously evil fascination. De Sade's "indifference of nature" argument is a brilliant aberration with which it is surprisingly easy to sympathise while he speaks. It is enhanced (and not swallowed up as I have heard argued) by the seething revulsion of the setting. To say, as he does in his coolly philosophic way, that "a man who destroys without passion is a machine", or "the only thing that gives life meaning is a [tortured] death", or as Marat vehemently contradicts struggling out of his sick-bath that "where there is no meaning I will invent a meaning!", to say this in the midst of rabid insanity so variously personified, has a dramatic irony which questions not only these 'rational' systems but all rational systems then and now.

Weiss constantly points the contemporary relevance of this historical situation, particularly in the mock obsequity of the herald towards those representatives of progressive society (the newly-rich post-revolutionaries sitting onstage) with whom we, the audience, are somehow forced to identify. It appears to me that Weiss's own sympathies must lie somewhere between de Sade and Jacques Roux. On the authority of the programme notes it is interesting to learn that soon after writing this play, Weiss joined the Comunist party.

The very idea of setting a criticism of mad humanity in an asylum for patients suffering from such complaints as paranoia (the patient playing Marat), sleeping sickness (Cordax ) and erotomania (Duperett) may seem to some as begging the question. (Isn't the pairing off of Duperett and Corday a beautifully mischievious irony?) But if it does appear to beg the question, at least it does so in a dramatically viable way. Images carry the force of vision in any work of art and Weiss shows a great talent. Of course the asylum is the main one but there are many others in the speeches (especially de Sade's) and as visual effects: Marat burning up from skin disease in his bath; the stylisation of Corday's repeated visits to murder Marat; the gory guillotine mime and the little working model for children; the chorus's constant and envigorating irony; de Sade being whipped by Corαay's long hair as he kneels to philosophise before the audience.

The cast was superb. Mervyn Thompson both played de Sade and produced with inspired assurance. Catherine Wilkin evolved Charlotte Corday with a sustained "brilliance that was unnerving to watch. To mention any more would only result in a catalogue of praise. It was useful to have seen the film first. The play still became an unforgettable happening with an overpowering sense of involvement, as if the audience had been cast in a part analogous to those other well-dressed spectators onstage.