Word: marat
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Hard and Cold. When Brook opened his shocking and magnificent Marat Sade, with Glenda playing the mad, murderous Charlotte Corday, her performance was one of the truly curdling experiences in contemporary theater; it gained her widespread attention in London and New York. It also created a mold that was both rewarding and discomfiting. "I really loathed that play," she admits. "It was so hard and cold. There was very little interaction, since all the inmates were operating on separate levels of madness. But at least by the time I left it, I didn't have to scratch for work...
Ouologuem manages his tableaux with a violent compression of energy, as if he were staging Marat/ Sade played by the Keystone Kops. Over the centuries, in the name of Allah, in the name of Christ, in the name of the god of self-interest, "that precious raw material, the niggertrash" of Nakem is conquered, exploited, then "freed" by new conquerors -Arab, French, even, alas, black...
...show's director, Peter Brook, is a man of many devices. His chief device is to defeat the traditional expectations of the audience. His credo might be "Accentuate the opposite." This credo links Marat/ Sade with King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Do we expect actors to move naturally on stage and to speak intelligible words? In Marat/ Sade, Brook made his actors move as if walking were a stylized, agonized abstraction of motion. The actors moaned, groaned, hissed and made surrealistic animal noises. Do we think of Lear as an arrogant red-hotheaded old king...
...historic side of the journal begins with a fine whiff of actuality. Restif chooses July 14th to oversleep and misses the storming of the Bastille. He meets the bloody-minded revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, before Marat has any importance, and finds him horrifying. Later, someone shouts "Power to the people!"almost 200 years ago. What great luck, the reader thinks, that Karmel has unearthed the diary of a man as impressionable as Restif...
...black beret. Arab guerrillas sometimes name combat operations in his honor. Posters of Che adorn dorm walls from Berkeley to Berlin, and his books have become basic-training manuals for the New Left. Writers from Graham Greene to Susan Sontag have extolled him. West German Playwright Peter Weiss (Marat/ Sade) has even compared him to "a Christ taken down from the Cross...