Theatre Design & Technology - May 1966 - 22

Reports on Theatre Design as Theatre

WITH THIS ISSUE

THEATRE DESIGN

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ C. Ray Smith

TECHNOLOGY we inaugurate a regular feature of

reports on current theatre. Its aim will be to keep our readers abreast of new design ideas, new
methods of stagecraft, and new designers; that is, both its visual as well as its literary artistic
creations. The art of Theatre, like landscape architecture, is one of the more ephemeral of man's
arts. Doubtless in compensation, it has been considered primarily as a wing of the more permanent art of literature.
Yet as anyone who has ever been seized by theatre knows, its quintessence is not merely a flawless rendition of a brilliant text illuminatingly clothed; rather it is those magical moments when
an invisible yet blinding electricity crackles in the psychic air to weld audience and actors.
When the mesmerizing performers wield a play with control over the emotions of the audience, a
disconnected, mid-air happening occurs like flash-fire magic, which only the ephemeral, living
theatre can bring. These happenings do not ring out from a printed page, but on Iy in the auditorIum.
So it is in an attempt to examine not only the ideological, literary creations of Theatre but also
the physical, visual arts that this column is undertaken.
How well we succeed wi

be the burden of others to determine.

WEISS / MARAT-SADE / BROOK
Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade the most brilliant derivotive of the "Theotre ot the Absurd" genre, is a
black comedy played in white shrouds. In Peter
Brook's sensotional production, brought from Lcndon
to New York for a limited engagement, it displays
an utterly new texture of theatre--not gaunt and
vacant like most "absurd" works, but turgid with a
hypnotic involvement that is achieved by almost
ritualistic
incantation. Springing from Brook's
previous experiments in the "theatre of cruelty," this
method is gripping, grabbing, depressing, exhi larating, hitting- below-the-belt, analogical action that
reinterprets symbols of behavior with a blinding
clarity. Marat/Sade is one of the great theatre experiences of our age. You can quote that.
Under the nebulous mushroom cloud of today's
forces, it appears that no one can take an unwavering, unambiguous stand and still be true to the tenor
of our time. Yet, ingeniously, Weiss and Brook (for
they are virtually indistinguishable in the production) are the first to achieve a theatrical breakthrough in this direction, barraging the audience
with concurrent and conflicting images--physical as
well as literaryuin a way that creates a sensory
implosion consistent with the mental fission of our
age.
Like an optical trick, Marat Sade is a discontinuous
playuas discontinuous as any Tensegrity structure
of Buckminster Fuller's. Its levels of reality are
separate and seem never to touch. Its composite
meaning is revealed by bias cuts of insight u by
a kind of dramaturgical fall-out. Yet, however shifting, its levels are distinguishable from the full
title: The Persecution and Assassination of JeanPaul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton Under the Di recti on of The

Marquis de Sade.
The main action is the staging of a play about the
Jacobi n French Revo lutionary, Marat, who cru sade s
for the improvement of mankind while sitting in a
therapeutic bath of pain. This play-within-our- play
is ostensibly written by the Marquis de Sade, who
believes only in mankind's enduring value in selfish
pleasure, with its nth degree as destruction. As he
directs the play, Sade's painfully rational debate
with Marat reveals paradoxically that it is he, the
outcast hedonist, who speaks for the establishment
rather than Marat--the soc i a I leper hi ding in his
cocoon-like tub--who rants for "rationality" and
enjoys an irrational pain derived from impeded "progre s s.
The play ultimately depicts the assassination of
Marot by Charlotte Corday--after his persecution
both by the French populace and by Sade's debate.
It is performed for therapeutic purposes by the inmates of the mental Asylum of Charenton, where
Sade was imprisoned after the French Revolution for
his psychoti c hedon ism and where, in fact, he did
write plays which were attended by fashionable
Parisians.
The performers of this historical action-already
intermixed with the ideological de bote of the two
main characters-are a bizarre chorus of paranoids,
erotomaniacs, spastics: finger-twitching, sniveling,
jerking, maniac animals with varying degrees of
nightmare lunacy. Dressed in white linen shrouds,
they weld their improvisation-derived, ghoulish
characters into a hypnotic ritual of incantation that
is irresistably, hideously entrapping. It is a hodgepodge of Socratic bedlam that functions as marathon
shock therapy.

I USITT

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOl~Y

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