‘Marat’ Overflows with Potential

“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.

—Staff writer Madeleine M. Schwartz can be reached at mschwart@fas.harvard.edu.