Peter Weisss The 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, to give this play its correct title, is an extraordinary piece of work. It takes place on July 13, 1808, after the French Revolution; the play directed by the infamous Marquis de Sade within the story takes place during the Revolution, in the middle of 1793, culminating in the assassination of Jean Paul Marat. The actors are the inmates of the asylum supervised by the bourgeois director of the hospital, Coulmier, a supporter of the post-revolutionary government led by Napoleon. This play within a play device needs skillful handling, and though the actors from ETB are pretty good this production suffers from a lack of numbers the stage needs to be teeming with characters.Instead we get eight performers, seven of them female, Coulmier being the only character played by a man (Sam Bright). The pivotal part of de Sade is played by Harriet Madeley. This is a huge mistake, not because shes no good (shes very truthful), but because its surely true thats only a man could have developed his twisted and nihilistic philosophy. Under his directions the inmates act out the insanity of the Revolution and its implosion and the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday, but not before much philosophical debate about the effectiveness of the Revolution and many other things.The verse speaking is pretty good, and the company is happiest when performing the musical set pieces (music by Jessie Regan). Chelsea Walkers direction is tight and makes the most of this rather strange triangular space. There is one very disturbing scene, where de Sade asks to be whipped whilst he discourses on the Revolution. As far as I could make out, this was performed for real in this production, with Madeley receiving several stinging blows on her back with a leather belt. Im not sure of the ethics of this one of the points of rehearsals is to find safe ways of presenting the illusion of violence on stage. The audience I was in was noticeably uneasy during this scene.Philosophy on its own does not make for good theatre which is one of the reason Weiss used the construct of the play within the play, and created the human circus of the grotesque, contorted, frightened and frightening inmates to make it theatrically interesting. For the second time in two days at this space the show was considerably shorter than its advertised running time. Though this is irritating and probably at least morally in contravention of some advertising code, its symptomatic of this show that I dont think the audience were too bothered by the early finish.
