Marat/Sade

Peter Brook’s 1964 staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade for the RSC was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a young journalist. The magnificently titled Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade was a knockout. With Patrick Magee as de Sade, Ian Richardson as the Herald (later as Marat) and Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, the play’s argument between de Sade’s belief only in the warts and all of one’s own self and Marat’s faith in utopian socialist revolution made spellbinding theatre, the dialectics irresistibly packaged with song and dance routines and the brilliance of Peter Brook’s production.

It was, I suppose, inevitable that in revisiting the Asylum for the RSC’s 50th birthday season, the brave director Anthony Neilson should transpose the French revolutionary context to the Middle-Eastern ferment of today. You get the picture at once from Corday in improvised military fatigues (worn over an ‘I ♥ Paris’ T-shirt), the casting of an Asian Marat (Arsher Ali), ensconced in his bath with a laptop, and Khyam Allami’s versions of Richard Peaslee’s original tunes.

The inmates are no longer distressing embodiments of insanity. Here they’re kitted out in white protective clothing as though against nuclear fallout, a chorus who can safely be entrusted with smartphones, machineguns and to do whatever they’re asked. Should compulsive masturbation and the voicing of extreme revolutionary sentiment get out of hand, the asylum’s director and impresario of the therapeutic theatricals, Coulmier, has the WiFi means to deliver punitive electric shocks. This is unfortunately no match for Weiss’s idea, perfectly executed by Brook, that the inmates are under the closest supervision of male nurses ‘with long white aprons which give them the appearance of butchers.