Marat-Sade: The Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton will go down in the history of the University of Ottawa Theatre department!
Photo Marianne Duval. Paul Piekoszewski (Marquis de Sade) and Jérémie Cyr-Cooke (Marat).
This play written in German by Peter Weiss, with the terribly long title, was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of Peter Brook’s LAMDA experiment , a season of Cruelty, executed under the influence of Artaud’s essay The Theatre of Cruelty . The original version of the essay, first published in French in 1938 , eventually appeared in English in the early 1960s during the neo romantic revolution in the Americas and that is when the English speaking theatre world began working on interpretations of Artaud’s ideas of a “theatre of Cruelty” . Brook worked with a chosen group of actors and writers to show the relationship between theatre and the body, between, theatre and therapy, as well as the use of theatre to transform and renew Western culture by taking a new look at the French Revolution as well as the conventions of the Western stage. One look at this play, shows us to what extent Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789 was very likely inspired as much by Brecht’ as by Brook’s renewed vision of the stage.
At the centre of his theatre was the actor’s body, subjected to a new mode of existence, to psychophysiological effects, leading to the creation of Theatre laboratories where actors were subjected to gruelling and rigourous corporeal training that Grotowski and others found in non-Western theatre. We saw similar events happening around Europe and North America under the direction of Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin, Julian Beck, and many other creators whose work no longer centred on the text but on the actor , as the focus was the creative process, which became even more important than the final discrete performance event.
Since that first production by Brook in 1964, Marat-Sade has already been given professional performances by some of the most noteworthy directors : Roger Planchon, Ingmar Bergman,. However it is rarely seen in America so this production at the University of Ottawa, directed by J ames Richardson, MFA Candidate and artistic director of Third Wall Theatre was an enormous challenge for all concerned.
What we see on the University of Ottawa stage, appears to be close to what Brook himself would have admired : savage, highly skillful, bursting with anger, with energy, with talent, with extreme physicality and a staging that took into account the density of the text, revealing level upon level of meaning. Every element of the staging contributed immensely to this cultural revolution , drawing from its British Elizabethan roots, while also exploding the conventions of the Elizabethan stage taken up in a Brechtian episodic structure that brings much depth to the content. Margaret Coderre-Williams lighting design, Graham Price’s set design, musical direction by Nick Carpenter, and Angela Haché’s costumes all contributed their original work to this vast undertaking. .
A huge cast of about 30 performers, beautifully orchestrated by James Richardson, shows us a “mise en abyme”, where the inmates in the Asylum of Charenton , directed by the Marquis De Sade, also one of the patients, because he was imprisoned there for many years for his immoral writings and questionable behaviour, create a political show, expressing their fury, their frustration, their discontent with society and their need for freedom. The play is also about Brook’s questioning of the way theatre functions in the contemporary world. We see the the Marquis watching, off to one side, as the Inmates act out the political creatures involved in the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as conceived by de Sade. They add a perfectly exciting musical accompaniment (which retains Richard Pease lee’s excellent expressive music. Not unlike moments of Weil’s compositions,) and then they bring to life in his bath tub, Jean-Paul Marat, the radical Jacobin left wing defender of the French Sans –culottes , the poor hard liners of the Revolution who wanted to get rid of the Middle class, much in keeping with the real Jean-Paul Marat’s sentiments. . The performance takes place in 1808, (during the reign of Napoléon), but it tells of the assassination which took place in 1793. We are struck by the fact that the philosophical discussions about society and the political discussions about social struggle, about the power of those who possess the banks, the finances, the structures of any society (revealed during the verbal encounters between Marat and Sade) , are extremely contemporary and make us shudder as we see how these strange, staggering, stuttering, jerking, wounded creatures, sing, play instruments, act, mumble, and produce words that are so relevant to us today. It also equates De Sade’s unfathomable behaviour of the period with his belief that man was to be true to his nature and since the philosopher thought nature was cruel, and indifferent, responsible for man’s self destruction, his lifestyle was in perfect keeping with his philosophy and Weiss/Brook capture this through a so called theatre of cruelty proposed by Artaud in the early period of his writings. We now have a much more nuanced understanding of what “cruelty” means in Artaud,s writing.
Several things strike us about this performance. James Richardson’s great attention to detail was quite exquisite. The director orchestrated the gestures, the movements of every single actor whether the figure in question was centre stage or way off in a corner somewhere, barely visible. Thus, all those individual dramas taking place on that stage at the same time, were brought to the fore ground in a most remarquable way. You would see disturbing things happening stage right, stage left, upstage, downstage, at the back , around the wings , crawling up the walls of the wings, all at the same time. There were the guards mistreating the inmates, and applying ways of treating mental illness and calming patients who get excited, “therapy” it was called by the director at that time, techniques that were nothing less than torture, as seen today. Bodies being assaulted , emotions somatised, everything passing through the body as Brook transformed Stanislavsky’s principle of acting based on emotional memory, into a form of corporeal memory where the body becomes the focus of everything. Thus, the suffering bodies of these inmates, became the origin of the theatrical process. Leading them all to a state of psychophysiological enlightenment allowing them to grasp the meaning of class struggle through the discomforts of the body. Water torture, beatings by guards wandering around with clubs and dressed in bloody aprons like butchers, suggest they are responsible for the inmates being soaked, manhandled, tied up, stretched on wracks and electrocuted. Are these the Nazis to come? Anything is possible. And then, the musicians, in true Brechtian fashion are on stage but locked behind a huge wire cage, only allowed out during intermission.
Although this is orchestrated as a perfectly balanced ensemble piece, certain “bodies” attract much attention. Jérémie Cyr-Cooke was a most excrutiatingly painful Marat, played by an inmate who suffers from a devastating disease that produces dried out swollen skin, creating unbearable, itching sensations. Even though he spends his time sitting in a bath tub in soothing water, being caressed by his wife Simone, the creature’s body becomes the physical incarnation of the unbearable state of Marat’s tortured relationship between the Revolution, the popular classes who don’t realize what is happening and his artistocratic origins. M. Cyr-Cooke was given to a most painful scratching that felt he was ripping his body apart, just as his vision of the revolution was slowly and painfully tearing him apart. A powerful performance by this young man. Emma Hicky’s Charlotte Corday is portrayed by a woman who has sleeping sickness and is constantly in a state of near collapse, something which would seem to contradict her function of assassin, and yet the Marquis has decided that this strange dialectic of action and incapacity to act, suits the talents of the revolutionaries who had difficulty carrying out their tasks. Annik Welsh was an excellent Herald, often played by a young “man” but here, she was a magnificently theatrical creature who stumbled and danced around the stage, giving the “trois coups” when it was necessary, introducing the participants, and fulfilling the role of a whole chorus with much moquery, seriousness and a whole variety of attention getting-strategies.
Go see this and watch for the acting process embedded in the text, one that Richardson has clearly understood and has done his best to extract from the mass of encounters between actors, music, and the reconstructing of a play that tears down so many fascinating stage strategies..
Quite the contrairy, this play is not therapy, nor does it calm the audience or the ex cited inmates, as the director of the institution would have us believe. It is a hysterical overdose of creative liberty, cleverly managed by a director who has understood the subtle contradictions that are the very basis of this work of the stage.
Bravo ! to the whole cast and especially to James Richardson who dared carry out such an undertaking.
Plays at the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa, until Saturday, February 28, at 8pm
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
by Peter Weiss
Directed by James Richardson
Set Graham Price,
Musical director, Nick Carpenter
Lighting design, Margaret Coderre Willliams
Props, Even Gilchrist
Original music: Richard Peeselee
CAST:
Jean-Paul Marat Jérémie Cyr-Cooke
Charlotte Corday Emma Hickey