James Leaf

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

Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club
October, 2009
Loeb Experimental Theater

(From “Crazy for A Revolution," The Harvard Crimson. October 30, 2009 by Hana Bajramovic.)

The madness of the French Revolution and the madness of the everyday overlap and intertwine in “Marat/Sade,” the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play, “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.” The production, which opens tonight and runs through November 7 at the Loeb Experimental Theater, tells the story of that infamous character for whom the term “sadism” was coined, the Marquis de Sade, and his internment at the Charenton Asylum shortly after the French Revolution. A play within a play, the show aims to combine its two settings—revolutionary Paris and an asylum fifteen years later—with an emphasis on the similarities between the seemingly disparate conditions.

The story is partially based on true events. In the early 19th century, Sade was indeed imprisoned in Charenton, where he staged performances using other inmates as actors. The play within “Marat/Sade” focuses on just one of these stagings: Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jean-Paul Marat at the height of the French Revolution’s political terror.

Originally in German, Weiss’ play saw its first English production in 1964, when it was taken up by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook. According to director James M. Leaf ’09-’10, this production had served as a commentary on the Cold War; Marat was used as an allegory for East Berlin, Sade as an allegory for the West. This particular interpretation, which pitted one titular character against the other, possesses little contemporary relevance in Leaf’s play, which lays its emphasis more on the relationship and similarities between the two characters, rather than on their opposition.

“I see Sade and Marat as much more closely allied in some ways,” Leaf says, who used the interplay of the two temporally-divided settings—the asylum and the revolution—to help create the bond.

According to Christine E. Gummerson ’12, who plays Rossignol, there are many parallels between the events in revolutionary France and the madhouse. “There is this feeling of ‘What have I done to deserve this? Why me?’” she says. In both situations, the victims—the poor and the mad, respectively—feel unfairly punished. With this injustice comes desperation, and it is desperation, Gummerson says, that can bring people to the terrifying violence that marked the revolution.

This violence is evident in the asylum as well, says Leaf. “A huge part of this play is the idea of violent demasking of violence and violence that’s made to look like help.” The brutality of the asylum’s overseers, which they claim is for the good of the inmates, mirrors the Parisian proletariat’s view of violence—epitomized by the guillotine and the storming of the Bastille—as a means to a better end.

“These people are put in an insane asylum,” says Elyssa K. Jakim ’10, who plays Charlotte Corday. “They’re punished for what they are rather than what they’ve done.” For Leaf, this division between crimes of action and crimes of being lies at the heart of the production. “If you can truly understand the difference between them,” he says, “you can understand the play.”

An understanding of “Marat/Sade,” therefore, relies on an appreciation of its complementary contexts. The production aims to use asylum and revolution to emphasize one another and comment on the present day. In doing so it hopes to show that violent desperation is timeless and that it can bring any of us—all of us—to the brink of insanity.

(From “‘Marat’ Overflows with Potential," The Harvard Crimson. November 2, 2009 by Madeleine M. Schwartz.)

“Marat/Sade,” Peter Weiss’ violent, absurd, revolutionary drama, is both a wonder and headache. It’s a play within a play of the most perverse sort—the death of a radical written by a libertine and performed by lunatics; a thick weave of freedom and surveillance, change and identity brought together with a tense, gripping energy (and the occasional musical interlude). But it’s also a drama about events which took place 200 years ago driven by theories of theater half that age. One look at the show’s original 1963 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,” should raise a flag: this is not a straightforward piece of writing.

So if the most recent Harvard production, directed by James M. Leaf ’10, never quite manages to yoke the bloody, staggering energy of the text, it mostly doesn’t matter; the resulting performance still fulfills the creepy, shaking nature of Weiss’ script. “Marat/Sade” is an apt and skilled production of a difficult and exciting play. It is unfortunate, though, that it sometimes overwhelms itself with the promise of its own potential.

The underlying story is fairly simple. Sickly with a skin disease, revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat (Mark A. Moody ’07) spent much of the revolution in a bathtub, writing pamphlets and soothing his sores until he was murdered by Charlotte Corday (Elyssa Jakim ’10). Performed in the insane asylum, the act’s unfolding is rich and nuanced. The cranky, nervous Marat is played by a paranoiac who at times must be detained because of his episodes; his words are twisted and debated by the cool and assured Marquis de Sade (Olivia J. Jampol ’10), who directs and occasionally intervenes in his own creation.

Such double-characters require skilled acting, and watching one identity leak out through another is a particular joy of this production. As both the resolute Charlotte Corday and the sleepy, hesitating inmate who plays her, Jakim manages her identity especially well. She forgets her lines with ease. The chorus also wavers deftly between unhappy inmates and unhappy poor, and their frequent off-tone songs keep the show from dragging.

Even the audience is asked to take on a double role. We are at once 1808 bourgeois intellectuals invited to witness the playacting of inmates and our own theatre-going selves, who watch both the play itself and the intellectuals’ reaction to it. This idea of surveillance and reaction comes from the text—Weiss was influenced by the theories of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright who believed in politicizing theater by highlighting its artificiality—and Leaf uses it fully.

The lights remain half-lit for much of the performance, so that as the actors enact the “general copulation” of revolution or recreate the swift drop of the guillotine, the audience may look around and watch each other writhe.

At times, these moments are more silly than shocking, but when they work, Leaf causes the distress the play wants. Toward the middle of the play, Corday whips Sade under his own request. No real leather is used (Jakim sets her hair to the task), but Jampol’s grimaces and cries express such a mix of pain and pleasure that it is hard to believe that no one is getting hurt. Standing, arms and legs outstretched in the middle of the prison, she is at once physically bound and liberated in her speech. “Now I see where the revolution is leading—to the withering of individual Man, the slow merging to uniformity,” she says, echoing the pains of the war. I almost fell off my chair.

Unfortunately, some more subtle aspects of the script never fully rise to the surface. Marat and Sade’s long debate about the nature of mankind comes across as exactly that—a debate more arcane than compelling. Leaf has said that he wished to compare the two title characters rather than contrast them, as is normally done, but in doing so, he fails to exploit the text’s inherent strength. Marat and Sade are so physically different—one spends most of the play horizontal and infirm while the other fully commands the stage—that considering them as equals flattens the excitement of their encounter.

Additionally, the choice to use a woman to portray Sade detracts from the overall production. The acting is not wanting—Jampol is excellent as the libertine—but the fact that she is not the same gender as her character forces one more idea into the play, and it doesn’t quite fit.

“Marat/Sade” is a play that desperately wants its viewers to question their surroundings. If the current production gets tangled at times, it is because it doesn’t always know when to stop asking for more.