History Through the Looking Glass
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel History Through the Looking Glass The Christmas card sent out this year by David Merrick to theater critics had a black border and showed Santa Claus on the end of...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel History Through the Looking Glass The Christmas card sent out this year by David Merrick to theater critics had a black border and showed Santa Claus on the end of a noose, eyes shut, tongue lolling out like a knockwurst...
...The only reality, says Weiss's Sade, is the imagination...
...Sade's political ideals (he believes only in himself), on the other hand, are confused with artistic ideals...
...The inmates are therefore drawn by their final chorus into a stamping ecstasy that takes them out of control of their keepers, and they burst into a revolution of their own...
...And we know that Sade himself was incarcerated in the asylum but not whether he was technically insane, in the light of either 1808 or today...
...He breaks up incidents, but he also breaks up man...
...Characters talk to one another but the talk has no discernible, much less dramatic, effect on their behavior...
...As a theater prophet I am a dead loss...
...I deduce this possibilitv from Ian Richardson's Marat...
...The components-limbs, head, trunk-and their accessories, like fingers, become loathsome little vestiges to be severed from the main body...
...Brook has given every actor a complete scenario...
...Stage discipline can go no farther, unless one day Andy Warhol adapts one of his movies and keeps an entire cast motionless on the boards for seven hours...
...Time and again he shores up Patrick Magee's featureless Sade -as well as Brook's and Weiss's glittering abstractions-with hard, troublesome particularities...
...Of these four, the most significant perspective is that of insanity...
...Not that they need heightening...
...His devotion to the play proceeds from his work with "The Theater of Cruelty" in London, based upon concepts of Antonin Artaud about fragmentation...
...while Sade, according to a stage direction, "stands upright on his chair, laughing triumphantly," as if this were a purpose in staging the play...
...and dogged theatricality (the action is a mélange of songs, choruses, anecdotes about mutilation, formal speeches, and interruptions...
...Thus, each of the mad faces -ghastly eyes, raddled cheeks, mouths that utter one line while they can scarcely contain another of contradictory import-and each jerking, pulsing body takes on a feverish dignity for the impersonations, a dignity imperilled every second by the likely eruption of a psychotic outburst...
...is he no more than a hack agitator still trying to get a childhood resentment of his parents out of his system...
...The central dialectic between Marat and Sade is, indeed, only partially political...
...But they have gained ground and currency outside France, mostly owing, I would speculate, to the pursuit of new ideas, any new ideas, in the theater, and to the success of 1) Genet and staged audacity, 2) Pop Art and its dehumanizing techniques...
...Richardson is the most versatile actor in the company...
...Weiss, operating through his projection of the Marquis de Sade, the putative author of the playwithin-a-play, has each of the historical persons acted by a lunatic with opposing characteristics...
...Rather as in Pirandello's Henry IV Marat/Sade makes use of no less than four "perspectives" or, in the Brecht jargon, "alienation effects": perspectives of time (the murder of Marat in Revolutionary 1793 is viewed from a Napoleonic 1808 vantage point...
...Weiss's own explications of the play, following the first waves of criticism, pro and con, attempted to situate him on the side of Marat...
...But unquestionably Marat/ Sade is an imposing play...
...He plays and articulates two men...
...It implies that there is no reality...
...The Merrick Foundation is now presenting Peter Weiss's Marat/ Sade as performed by the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Martin Beck under the direction of Peter Brook...
...he fears that he may love the people because the nobility has rejected him...
...The house echoes as much with terrified silences from the seats as with the rasping trumpets from the orchestra and the shouts, thuds and screams from the stage...
...Nor in "It is a privilege indeed/to introduce Voltaire He wrote Candide...
...Or, rather, he breaks him down, and with wanton delight...
...Charlotte Corday, the virginal ex-nun, by a girl with sleeping sickness...
...If Charlotte, conscientiously done by Glenda Jackson, would only abandon her staggers for five minutes we might perceive the historical figure and mad actress in separate, dramatic aposition, rather than in a garish mêlée of raving logic...
...Brook achieves some keen ironies in having his madmen talk sense...
...Between them they emit enough gibberings and parade enough epilepsies to glut a convocation on abnormal psychology...
...Marat's speeches tangle his political beliefs with his motives, and in one sequence called "Marat's Nightmare" he is arraigned before his conscience...
...The play rebuts him furiously...
...Artaud's theories, if they can be called anything as coherent as theories, have mostly spun off drama that reads like elaborations of headlines in The Enquirer ("Bov Slices Off Baby Sister's Head For A Bet" sort of thing...
...I see no advantage whatever in such bumpy jingle-jangles as: "Charlotte Corday awake and stand/Take the dagger in your hand...
...MY OWN RESERVATION about the play is that the principal conversation is, at its face value, of no consequence to either character...
...we are confronted with the choice of one mad alternative or another, but we must choose...
...But Weiss must have felt that the play-withina-play existed in a vacuum if, at the end, the characters were unaffected by its recital...
...The remnants of Artaud's plays -which may have been only remnants of plays to start with: The Jet of Blood is sometimes fancily called a scenario-constitute disorganized rituals, not stories...
...he doubts his own sincerity...
...there is no help for it...
...I have seen him in half a dozen roles and he gets continually better...
...historically and theatrically the two men have no stake in what they are saying...
...There are 32 actors in the company...
...There is no pure debate between collectivism and individualism, or, as it sometimes appears to be, between altruism and inaction...
...To me Artaud seems to fluctuate between surgery and butchery...
...Since I saw it in London 15 months ago Brook has clarified the staging, fortified the casting of Marat immeasurably by substituting Ian Richardson for Clive Revill and introduced one conceit that the Lord Chamberlain in Britain would never have sanctioned: Richardson climbs naked into his tub, to offer the audience a blunt view of shanks and haunches...
...Brook's contribution to the performance manifests itself throughout...
...Simonne Evrard, his mistress and nurse, by a spastic...
...The performance is liable to switch from patients stomping distraughtly over one another to Charlotte Corday, isolated by quiet and singing a pretty pastoral, with lute accompaniment, in which she promises to knife Marat...
...Duperret, an aristocrat who shuns violence, by a sex maniac, and so on...
...Nothing hinges on the outcome...
...Merrick, Broadway's most disarming compromise between esprit and chutzpah, some time ago set up the David Merrick Arts Foundation, described by him as his little Lincoln Center and presumably meant to lose money on worthwhile drama...
...Where Weiss himself stands along the political arc is another issue of moment mainly to his biographers, to posterity, and to the politico-cultural chitchat crowd...
...of place (the events in Paris, Caen, and elsewhere are set in the bathhouse of the Charenton Asylum): insanity (the actors are asvlum inmates...
...and he may still be sore at the world's ingratitude for his occasional oblations...
...We are never certain whether he appears as protagonist for a man living among other men, in a polis as a political animal, or for man as he lives in his own mind, explores it, and tries to communicate his discoveries to others...
...Such work is meant to be received with disgust by the spectator's sense of wholeness and preservation...
...If the play is straight ritual, this point does not arise...
...So do the scripts by some of his on-andoff disciples, such early ones by Adamov as La Grande et la petite manoeuvre, Genet's The Screens, and Armand Gatti's Le CrapaudBuffle, in which a dictator dismantles his body and hangs member after member on a line like banners...
...Marat, the earnest revolutionary, confined to a steam bath and dreaming imootently about putting out Calls To The Nation, is played by a paranoiac...
...let accountants tell whether the limited run through March 19 will diminish or replenish the Foundation's reserves...
...And by holding down the paranoiac spasms he even turns Marat into an alter ego of the madman...
...If Marat/Sade, then, is theater in four dimensions, it is also madness accusing itself of sanity, and history through the looking glass...
...Marat's lines have been written by Sade to be spoken by a madman...
...However, Marat/Sade, a collaboration between Brook, an Englishman, and Weiss, born in Germany and domiciled in Sweden, demonstrates that Artaud's influence can be absorbed into an historical play indebted to such "mainstream rebels" as Brecht and Pirandello...
...To these complications one must add further cautions...
...It did so effectively with Arturo Vi...
...The translation, which chops from good blank verse by Geoffrey Skelton to rhyming doggerel by Adrian Mitchell sounds often like a transposition from a poetry reading to an English pantomime...
...A graduate student would talk about Artaud's smashing of conventional dramatic progression and replacing it with anything-can-happen assaults on the auditorium...
...One experiences infinite pathos (suffering and sympathy) on hearing a madman (as a citizen) cry "We're all normal and we want our freedom...
...It is a fair guess, though, that Brook wanted this sort of vulgarity in the language to heighten his shock effects...
...But the irony as a whole would be stronger had he allowed us glimpses of what the real Charlotte Corday or the real Duperret might have been, with the insanity peering through only sporadically...
Vol. 49 • January 1966 • No. 2
