Word: marat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. Under the direction of Peter Brook, Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company has successfully transformed Peter Weiss's hit play into a cinematic rowdydow no less frazzle-dazzling than it was on the stage...
...bathhouse in the asylum where Sade spent the last 13 years of his life-and actually did write plays for the inmates to perform. Playwright Weiss supposes that Sade once wrote a drama in the form of a debate between himself and the great demagogue of the French Revolution. Marat (Ian Richardson) stands for social progress; he believes that the only way to improve people is to improve the society they live in, that violent revolution is the best way to begin. Sade (Patrick Magee) stands on the contrary for moral autarchy; he believes that the only way to change...
...implications, but in intellectual terms it is platitudinous and inconclusive. "The play's chief aim," Sade observes, "has been to take to bits Great Propositions and their opposites." On the emotional plane, however, there is no doubt about who wins. The inmates set up a mad clamor for Marat's cause. Drooling, twitching, cross-eyed, filthy, they stagger about the stage like broken bugs. "We want our revolution," they croak in cracked chorus...
...they get what they want. Marat, stabbed by a spastic Charlotte Corday (Glenda Jackson), lies weltering in his tub of blood. The director of the asylum and his guests politely applaud the conclusion of the piece; but the inmates, identifying with their roles, run suddenly amuck. Fighting, biting, ripping, raping, they swarm over the guards and the guests, they leap upon the camera and drag the spectator down into the delirium of a revolution that is suddenly no longer there and then but here, now, always...
...message of Marat / Sade seems to be that bourgeois society is a madhouse, and anybody who lives in it must be out of his mind. In the talented hands of Weiss and Brook, there is dramatic power in an idea whose time has passed...