Review: Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This edition starts with a wonderful introduction/essay by Peter Brook, the English theatre and film director. Not only does he analyze the play and its reception but tackles the topic of what makes theatre good, in general.

The play itself is one of Sade's swan songs from imprisonment at Charenton, the final imprisonment and the place of his death. In it, the imaginary meeting between the Marquis and Marat is a departure point for Sade, who had said, "It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others", to feel resentment over his own condition:

"Give up Marat
You said yourself nothing can be achieved by
scribbling
Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece a roll of paper
in my dungeon years ago
It vanished when the Bastille fell
it vanished as everything written
everything thought and planned
will disappear."

and echo the French soul's buyer's remorse over buying revolution heavily seasoned with violence:

"We're all so clogged with dead ideas
passed from generation to generation
that even the best of us don't know the way out
We invented the Revolution
but we don't know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn't part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king"

Marat and Sade both saw the need for revolutionary change and in answering the call, they were killed by the demons they themselves helped to summon:

"...you came one day to the Revolution because you saw the most important vision
That our circumstances must be changed fundamentally
and without these changes everything we try to do must fail"



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