#491: Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade
Liberty, madness and revolution in microcosm
Initial release: 1967
Director: Peter Brook
The infamous Marquis de Sade spent much of his later life imprisoned at Napoleon’s order in a mental asylum, which at the time were largely storehouses for the mentally ill and people from respectable families who were deemed a threat to that respectability. But prior to his imprisonment by Napoleon he did participate in political life throughout the Revolution, serving in the National Convention alongside Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin firebrand whose rhetoric eventually led a moderate Girondist to murder him in his bath lest he send all the Girondists to the guillotine.
While locked up in Charenton Asylum, he was permitted by the director to stage his plays for the general public using his fellow inmates as actors. The director, François de Coulmier, had very radical (some have argued permissive) views on mental healthcare for the time, preferring to give his charges the chance to express themselves via art therapy.
All this provides the background for German playwright Peter Weiss’ landmark 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, more often called Marat/Sade, which is significantly less of a mouthful. Set in 1808, it’s exactly what the title suggests: a play within a play, a philosophical performance about the assassination of Marat and the circumstances that led to it, put on by asylum inmates who have their own views on the whole thing. Now, translate it to English, put the whole thing to camera and include a bunch of the actors from the American production, and you’ve got Peter Brooks’ 1967 film adaptation, which is a wild ride of its own.
Essentially, Marat/Sade is a dialectical work. For all his reputation, Sade was an impassioned libertine who extolled Enlightenment ideals, rejected the idea of property, and laid some of the groundwork for later individualist anarchist thought. Marat in comparison was a devoted Jacobin who was always on the hunt for enemies of the Revolution. Weiss uses these two men to examine the Revolution, questioning just who it all was really for; conversely, Coulmier is an ardent Napoleonist who oversees the whole production, often breaking in to scold Sade for not cutting the more openly seditious material nor controlling his cast better. In this Coulmier represents the insidiousness of liberalism, letting his patients express themselves so long as they don’t talk about their own revolution. When the cast grabs the bars separating them from the audience and shout, “Freedom!” — they really mean it. Where Weiss stands in all this, meanwhile, is unclear, but it’s worth noting that this and other plays, particularly his one about Trotsky, made him very unpopular in East Germany. (Not that he particularly had to worry about his safety, as he moved to Sweden in the 1930s and lived there the rest of his life.)
Of course, as this is a review of the film version of the play — put on by none other than the man who did the American theatrical production — let’s talk about the movie a little bit, shall we?
(As an aside, this wasn’t Peter Brooks’ first film, nor was it his last — the iconic 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies was his.)
As this is a play within a play, or at least a film adaptation of same, it’s probably not a surprise to you that the action is entirely within a single room. An audience sits beyond the bars, shrouded in darkness; we might sometimes hear their reactions, but they otherwise might as well not exist. This one single room — the therapeutic bathhouse with its white, clinical tile and cold light streaming in through the window — is a microcosm of the asylum, and indeed of the Revolution itself, France descending into terror while the world watches. However, the camera isn’t confined to the audience; Brooks’ treats the film as a film, moving about the stage, occasionally even showing us glimpses of the darkness beyond the cage — is it acknowledging a fourth wall? Or denying it?
Embodying Sade is Patrick Magee, a veteran actor with several notable horror film roles and a penetrating voice; it’s easy to draw a direct line from the moment where Sade is introduced, simply staring directly at the camera saying nothing, to the madness of Anthony Hopkins’ own Hannibal Lecter. It’s a chilling moment that is only made even more so in comparison to the film’s final moments, where Sade’s subtle manipulations lead the inmates to riot in the film’s final moments, the Marquis laughing darkly all the while.
Much of the rest of the cast is a collection of misfits, some barely functional, others an obvious danger to society. Glenda Jackson’s Charlotte Corday is a depressive narcoleptic who must frequently be awakened when it’s her line; the otherwise nameless Herald who serves as a sort of Narrator spends a good deal of time time protecting her from John Steiner’s Monsieur Dupere, an insatiable sex maniac. There’s also four singers who serve as a sort of Greek chorus — that’s right, this shit’s a musical, though the songs don’t actually move the play forward. Rather, they’re there to provide background, context to the scenes, often in quite a biting, sardonic manner. Indeed, the actual play, restricted to just its action, would be rather short.
Brooks makes excellent use of the tiny space to create a claustrophobic, intense little pressure cooker of a tale that, little by little, spins out of Coulmier’s control. Scene by scene, he gives the cast room to play their dual roles as actor and madman, and it’s a testament to their collective acting ability that sometimes the line is quite thin. With the use of two cameras — one looking down on the room, like a dispassionate observer in a panopticon, the other moving amongst the cast — Brooks allows us to see two different ways of looking at the world, a deliberate defiance of the separation between seats and stage.
Marat/Sade, as the film adaptation of a stage play, is shocking, disturbing, and incredibly on-point — an extreme film about extremists, using the language of the Revolution to talk about the world of the 1960s (and, indeed, the world today has much to learn from it.) Far from being a reactionary depiction of the Revolution, it’s an examination of the contradictions that tore it apart. It’s an examination of how revolutions fail, and how they get started to begin with.
