Theatre Design & Technology - May 1966 - 23

MARAT/SADE. Photos: (left) Jesse Alexcnder (right) Mike Schiffer. See also the reor cover. A 3.disc recording of the complete
ploy is now Qvailable, and a film version is in production.

This unwritten web of continuous character and
business, which is built to support the discontinuous
meaning, is a significant part of the play's new
theatrical texture. In it you cannot tell where Peter
Brook left off and where Malcolm Goddard, the
choreographer of this essentially non-musical play,
began.
The single setting for this cathartic performance is
the steam room and bathing hall of the asylum.
Designed by Sally Jacobs, the hall has buff-brick
painted drops enclosing a raked stage surrounded by
rough, be-steamed wood benches. The effect of
height created by the drops (and the forward halfceiling) and by Lloyd Burlingame's lighting is reminiscent of the designs of Grodon Craig. In the center
of the stage is a black perforated iron grill that
covers the steam outlet. (The steam--for Marat's
nightmare--is produced by fanned heated oi!.)
Surrounding it is a ring of sunken, white-porcelainlike bath dips, which are sometimes covered over
with slatted wood frame sand somet imes u sed by
the inmates as off.stage places, much as one would
improvise charades in a drawing room. They are also
microcosms of the larger snake-pit; and that locale,
in turn, is an extension of Marat's sitz-bath, where
he must stay because of a chronic skin disease.
The relative degrees of water, as of sickness, are
powerfully symbolic.
A "Parisian" audience is seated down left on the
projecting part of the bui It-out proscenium stage,
and now and then they rise in ind ignati on to protes t
the anti-establishmentarian play.
For, interspersed among the Socratic dialogue, the
snippets of on-again-off-again playlet, the sometimes-out-of-control
cavortings of the madmen
actors, and the monitoring of the nuns, are bits of
Brecht-like dramatic irony executed by the inmates.
These symbolic, detached spectacles are ineradicable
images. There is a black Our Father, and a slapstick guillotining by the frenzied populace. In this
latter action, the facsimi Ie victims drop one-by-one

May 1966

into a downstage bath-pit, and having dropped, their
heads lop over onto one shoulder; it is a ghastly,
si lent thud. There is a simi lar gui Ilotining of a
cabbage-headed effigy of Louis XVI. Both slaughters
are followed by the dumping of pails of the victim's
blood into a down-stage drain: the citizens' is red;
the king's is, naturally, blue. It is horribly funny.
At the end of the play, Marat's own milk-white blood
is also poured out, and the patriotic cycle is completed.
Some of the images are aural: the groaning, muttering, wailing, shrieking, singing (a chillingly timed
ironic usage of La Marseillaise). and the extended
hiss of the inmates to symbolize the sound of whips
as Char lotte Corday la shes Sade' s bare back--wi th
her hair--a shocking erotic image devised by Brook.
What happens amid thi s wild diversity of ambiguous
action is that you are sitting in a real audience
watching an unreal audience watch a play about a
real historical action; this is performed by unreal
madmen who are control Ied by unrea I sane nuns;
meanwhile real ideological issues are discussed by
two men, one of whom is playing a real paranoid
who is playing an unreal Marat and the other of
whom has written the other's unreal real lines. Besides, seated in the front far sides of the balcony,
ahead of the audience, is an orchestra composed of
more unreal lunatics who playa real unreal-sounding music.
By the middle of Marat/Sade, the audience does not
know what isreal ity and what is not, whose ideo s
are true and whose hollow, who is sane and who
insane--either on the stage or in the audience. The
production plays on the spectator as on a sliding
trombone of illusion/reality. It is a profoundly unsettling and disturbing experience of relativity--by
no means least in the cruel curtain call when the
inmates, enjoying the funny way the sane audience
has of indicating its. recognition of appalling truths,
begin to mimic with a cruel, joltingly embarrassing
lashing of applause in unison.

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