Drama

Peter Weiss: MARAT/SADE

„The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.“ (Marquis de Sade)

The revolutionary times bring verification of ideas in practice, followed by confusion. From a thought to an action, the evolutionary path is replaced by a revolutionary shortcut that necessarily leads to the tragedies of people and entire nations. Jean-Paul Marat, the icon of the French Revolution of 1789, experienced it for himself. His skin eczema forced him to spend hours in a bathtub, in which he was murdered after all.

But what does the Marquis de Sade, writer and philosopher, who is the  personification of sexual pathologies for today´s man and to whom we owe the concept of sadism, has to do with it? The German dramatist, Peter Weiss, has brought the excellent play to European drama, of which the original title, 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, suggests that the environment of the asylum, in which de Sade actually spent several years, and where he indeed rehearsed performances with his fellow patients, is an excellent framework for a statement about the great canvas of history of revolutions. And not only about the one, that shook the preserved European order at the end of 18th century, and was a prologue to the Marxist ideology and its bloody revolutionary embodiment over a hundred years ago.