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.

Then Came the Others

There were five other plays during the rest of the week, all of them having a curious sameness of fashion: stylised sets, alienation, improvisation. Three of them were inordinately preoccupied with demonstrating the difference between character and actor. Before Auckland's performance of John Brown's The Fall and Redemption of Man, the actors wandered out of the audience and stood about on the stage holding hands or pointing out friends in the audience. The whole cast was onstage throughout behind the acting platform where they could be heard and seen mumbling away and changing costumes. This may imitate the inconveniences of theatre-going in the middle ages but was otherwise no better than a distraction. This improvisation was suggested by the author, the actors were not very practised at it (even a good ad lib needs rehearsal) and this lack of assurance did not help. The play was on allegory of the Jesus story (prefaced by a bit of Eden) played straight for three hours. It would not be fair to knock the cast who were bearable for the first half at least—the shepherds were funny, Eve had good legs and Jesus Was promising but wordy (I swear I heard great chunks of rhyming couplets). Quite simply, it was a poor play and a relief to get out.

Massey offered The Madwoman and the Nun by Witkiewicz. This one is also set in an asylum where the genius-poet Walpurg rails agianst society which he feels is victimising him and seizes on the nun whom the psychiatrist has provocatively sent to attend him. Whatever the effect of passionately whipping off the nun's headress was intended to produce (and she later appears in a nightdress) it could not, at that moment, have been the gales of laughter the audience thought appropriate. I can only see that the play was intended as a farce of the Absurd. The acting—save that of the Madman himself. Arthur Ranford— consisted of stilted line sand unco-ordinated movement. At times it was incredibly funny for the wrong reasons. The clumsy direction never gave the play a chance; and it would be a fair bet that nobody backstage knew what the play was about either.

I regret that I missed seeing Otago's Tom Paine by Paul Foster. However, Bill Evans will now discuss the performance and will add something about the drama workshop:—

Tom Paine was very good visually. It opened with cartwheels and gossiping and waving to the audience by the assembled cast. There was an unscripted discussion by three actors of the characters they played, a bishop vanished upwards, ghosts gave off sparks, the stage one time was simultaneously Gin Row and a packet-boat at sea, and later, complex politicking was explained by living chess pieces. All this and more and more exciting than it sounds. Yet spontaniety is not the same as indiscriminate roudiness, and an audience can't pick up what's being said if everybody's improvising at once. Foster's play called for skilled, sophisticated performances, and most of these actors seemed not yet competent at straightforward roles. Warren Dibble was to my surprise (why?) damned good, rising to brilliant in his long monologue in prison. The whole thing was liberated theatre, but I can't see how Tom Paine, the american revolutionary has any relevance to New Zealand. Why not call it "Edward Gibbon Wakefield" and write it all yourselves; The show was very obviously the joint creation of Paul Foster and the La Mama Exeprimental Theatre of New York; to try and perform it way out here, without it being just as much the creation of the Otago students, was to leave it a dead play.

At a workshop session on Friday three actors from Auckland presented a short poetic play about Herod, Salome and John the Baptist. I didn't know their names, or the author's, but it was as near perfect as a student play is ever likely to be. Its name might have been something like "The Crying Head of the Prophet John." A really superb little thing.

Both Canterbury and Victoria presented the same play, After the Rain by John Bowen. They were not so much a clash as an amicable source of comparisons for the two casts. Canterbury's version was produced by Brian de Ridder who has come out of the ranks of their drama society. The actors were all good and had prepared their parts well, both individually and as a team. It was here that they had the edge on our own production. The play as written has faults of construction and character (which were discussed in an earlier review) but it was unfortunate that Canterbury had such a large actor for Armitage. It was ludicrous to see him fail to do a push-up (as the script requires) and simply not credible that he cows before Henderson who is clearly his physical and mental inferior.

The most obvious differences between the plays were the sets. Laurence Karasek for Canterbury created two large skeleton cubes of rough wood for the cabins and rigging ropes to suggest the rest of the raft. The essential acting areas on deck, in the cabins or in the hold were thereby clearly defined. Victoria's production was simpler with just table and chairs for the cabin scenes and open stage for the rest where the scenes were imagined from the dialogue. The Canterbury set was impressive, but as the Vic version showed, not really necessary. Besides, the beams often partly obscured some of the inside action.

Without Marat/Sade and Tom Paine, the week would have been a John Bowen festival, a very depressing thought. Mr Bowen pall rather quickly. He has been having a rash of successes in London; are these things inevitably contagious?