Word: corday
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Belle-Linda Halpern, who plays Charlotte Corday, the fiery young woman who stabs Marat to death is at the same time a groggy somnambulist who can barely wield a knife: she shuffles about in circles and slumps to the floor while delivering impassioned soliloquies. Funny yet frightening, pitiful yet majestic, Halpern's performance is haunting. Christopher Moore is the "lucky paranoiac" who gets to play Marat. Suffering from a skin disease, the feeble and pinched looking Marat crouches in a bathtub. His fervent speeches sound simultaneously noble and pathetic as he bleats them in a madman's wavering voice. Although...
...difficult role of Corday's lover Duperet, Ben Evett is hilariously lewd, while Laurie Gallueto is equally effective in the role of Simonne Evrard, the head of Charenton, who tries to neal her patients through participation in art. At the same time, she is the censor of the play, who interrupts subversive talk and menacingly reminds the crazies that "everything is being done to alleviate sufferings." Pale and stone-faced, she makes the audience's blood run cold...
...always will be; his ideological fervor is only inspired by latent lust and violence. As Sade himself quips, "People join revolutions when the adrenaline builds up." The radical soapbox priest, Jacques Roux, is played by a vociferous, apoplectic inmate (Kristen Gasser) who is restrained by a gag. Aroused by Corday's ghoulish description of a beheading she witnessed in Paris, the patients play at guillotining each other, tossing about a large red ball--a dismembered head--and tittering like demons...
...same token, Sade's scandalous love of physical torment overshadows his political convictions. In the famous whipping scene, for example, he strips to the waist and orders his hands bound. Summoning Corday to his side, he provides her with a whip and drawls: "And even now I should like to have this beauty here, who stands there so expectantly, and let her beat me while I talk to you about the revolution." The audience and other inmates gasp in horror and anticipation. Sade proceeds to crumple, groan and writhe on the floor, creating a sensation but garbling every word...