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Clare Finburgh
Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies
University of Essex
TH343 European Political Drama
Peter Weiss (1916-1982), The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by
the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade
(1965). First staged by Hans Anselm Perten in Rostock, East Germany, 1964.
The following notes provide background information to our seminar session. They are
intended as a starting point from which you can conduct further and more detailed
research. They include questions (in BLUE) that encourage you to explore themes and
issues in greater detail. If you refer to the notes in essays or examinations, please
ensure that you quote your source clearly.
SET TEXT: Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, verse adaptation Adrian Mitchell
(London/New York: 2001).
INTRODUCTION
 W. was born in Germany but escaped in 1934 when Hitler came to power, because his
father was a Jew. He first went to Britain; 1936-38 he went to Czechoslovakia until Hitler
invaded it; then he went to Götenborg in Sweden to join his family; finally he set up his own life
in Stockholm in 1940, where he remained for the rest of his life, writing both in Swedish and
German.
 W. began his career as a painter. He wrote about the war years in his autobiography:
My painting was action, an expression of life: I wanted to choose it consciously as my
alternative to taking part in the war (Leavetaking and Vanishing Point, p. 114).
But after the war, W. decided that painting was too static for expressing the fast-moving
political conditions and troubled anxieties of the modern world: the fear of fascism; exile and
the migration of the Jews; the death of millions. W. wanted to resolve his conflicting needs for
artistic self-expression and social involvement. He wanted to record and present what he
experienced, to create “a unity between inner and outer reality” (“Avantgarde Film”, Akzente,
pp. 316-17).
 Therefore, W. turned to literature. He was a novelist, playwright and political activist.
 M/S is his most famous play. It caused a sensation when first staged in the 1960s, and is
still staged frequently to this day: Berlin, Minneapolis, Hollywood (2000); Essex University
(2004).
THE WRITER’S COMMITMENT
 W. was a Marxist, though he never committed himself to any particular party.
 He was a harsh critic of capitalism and of Western imperialism, e.g. the Vietnam War.
However, he was also critic of political elites and hierarchies of the Left, e.g. Soviet regimes.
He denounced the Stalinist prevention of intellectual opinion. He always opposed censorship
and advocated tolerance.
 However, more and more throughout his career, W. challenged the idea of the artist’s
complete aesthetic freedom. W. says total aesthetic freedom is like “an escape hatch through
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which I could flee into the no-man’s-land of sheer imagination” (Karlheinz Braun ed.,
Materialien zu “Marat/Sade”, p. 116). W. thinks writers must have political commitment, and
denounces total autonomy in art. He feels that there is an imperative and responsibility of the
writer to make art accessible to rational analysis. His earlier theatre is abstract and absurdist
like Eugène Ionesco’s. E.g. The Insurance. But like Arthur Adamov, he gradually moved from
an abstract, absurdist, surrealist style, to a more tangible, realist, rationalist style. He says:
Of course the ideal would be for an artist to show the situation in which we live so
strongly that, if people … saw it on the stage they would go home and say: “Well we
have to change this. It’s not possible. We can’t live any longer like this” (BBC Interview
with A. Alvarez: ‘Truths That Are Uttered in a Madhouse’, reprinted in New York Times
Magazine, 26 December 1965, p. 3).
There are so many things, so many problems which involve you so you have no other
choice—you have to take them up. So for me it is very difficult to imagine to write only
about a small, private sphere and I find the most stimulating dramatic ideas in the
conflicts which are going on just now in the whole world. And because of that, the new
play which I am about to write will be in a wider sense, regarding the whole world
situation today, in a political way and a psychological way, too. The divided world—the
struggle which is brought out by the different points of social structures which exist now
(“Interview with Peter Weiss”, in Walter Wager, ed., The Playwrights Speak, p. 164).
 Where would you locate M/S? Would you say W. is very committed to a particular
political message in this play?
DIALECTICAL THEATRE
 W. said in and interview that he thinks Marat was right (“Interview with Peter Weiss”, in
Walter Wager, ed., The Playwrights Speak, p. 157). W. also says, “Any production of my play in
which Marat does not emerge as the winner will be mistaken” (trans. Heinz Bernard, Theatre
Quarterly 1, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1971), pp. 41-43).
 In addition, several of the first productions of the play, especially in East Germany, were
heavily biased in favour of Marat’s revolutionary idealism. E.g. in the première at Rostock
Volkstheater in East Germany in 1964 directed by Hans Anselm Perten, the inmates were
political prisoners. Sade was shown as a decadent libertine with very little merit; Marat was the
hero. The bloody riot and chaos at end of play was eliminated. It wouldn’t have been allowed
for a revolution to end in senselessness in East Germany. This production was clearly biased in
favour of Marat.
 But do you think M/S is really this biased and propagandist, or do you think it is
more nuanced and dialectical?
 W. explains that at first he was only going to include Marat in the play. Why do you
think he then introduced Sade?
 What impact does W.’s use of the play-within-the-play dramatic device have on any
potential propagandist message?
 See what Peter Brook says in his introduction to the play about its dialectical
construction.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MARAT/SADE
 W. spent several years researching the historical background to this play. It’s based on
several factual places, events and characters.
 The play is set in Charenton: an asylum near Paris for the insane, and also a prison for
political dissidents. Plays were often written and staged by patients, supposedly for therapeutic
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purposes. This form of “treatment” was fashionable under Napoleon (ruled 1804-1815). The
social elite attended performances for entertainment.
 M/S is set in 1808. The French revolution took place in 1789. Revolutionaries seized
power from King Louis XVI’s absolutist dynasty. The King was finally executed in January
1793. By 1804, the French republic had crumbled, and was taken over by Napoleon, an
imperialistic dictator. The play is set during his rule.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (1806).
 The play-within-a-play in M/S is written by the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and set in
1793. This was one of the most turbulent years of the revolution. France’s neighbours
threatened to invade it because they were afraid that revolutionary movement might spread to
their non-democratic, monarchist states (e.g. England, Austria). The French revolutionary
government imposed military conscription on its citizens, to boost army numbers. In addition,
there were shortages of basic supplies like bread in many cities, especially Paris. Therefore
there was general unrest amongst the peasant class, and in February 1793 there were riots in
Paris. So Sade’s play is set during a very unsettled period where both visionary intellectual
ideas, and positive action, were in demand.
 Riots were led by Jacques Roux (1752-1794). Roux was a former priest (see p. 10), and a
true revolutionary leader of people. He was arrested after Marat’s death, and committed
suicide.
 Jean-Paul Marat (1743-93) was a physician and naturalist. During the early stages of the
revolution he became a member of the new Republic government which was called the
National Assembly. Whilst other revolutionaries, especially the upper-bourgeois Girondistes,
became more and more moderate after 1789, Marat wanted to radicalise the revolution. He and
other radicals—Montagnards (amongst them Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (17581794) and Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794))—gradually pushed the Girondistes out of
the National Assembly.
 By May 1793 the radicals had full control. Marat was the most “socialist” of these 3 main
revolutionaries. Robespierre now wanted reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, whilst Marat
supported the revolutionaries even during their riots, and wanted to radicalise the revolution for
the sake of the sans culottes—Fourth Estate, i.e. common peasants and workers.
Robespierre
Danton
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Marat was in favour of the radical redistribution of wealth and in this respect was a precursor to
Karl Marx.
 1793 was a crucial moment in the revolution when leaders were deciding whether to side
with the emerging property-owning middle classes, or with the impoverished peasants and
workers.
 Marat had had numerous attempts on his life and had been forced to hide in the Paris
sewers. There, he’d contracted a skin disease (see p. 9) which caused terrible itching. He
therefore spent many hours in his bathtub, to relieve itching. He used to write in the bath, and
was finally assassinated in the bath by Charlotte Corday.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793).
2001
duction of Marat/Sade, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy Mota.
 Charlotte Corday (1768-1793) was a Girondist. Corday is usually portrayed in French
history as a beautiful virgin who stabbed the bloodthirsty revolutionary Marat and therefore
saved France from the Montagnard Reign of Terror. This distorted picture of Corday as
France’s saviour was perpetuated by the victorious bourgeoisie who praised Corday for having
spared France from Marat’s radicalism.
Anon., Charlotte Corday and Marat’s Corpse (1793-1800).
 Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a very controversial writer who had been imprisoned
under the monarchy for his novelistic, and real sexual debaucheries.
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Marquis de Sade.
He’d opposed the monarchy, as can be seen in his 120 Days of Sodom (1785), which shows
the brutalisation and sexual depravity of a sick society, especially the nobility. He was released
by the revolutionaries in 1789, but then imprisoned again because he was suspected of
counterrevolutionary activity. He was set free after Robespierre’s execution in 1794, but
interned at Charenton under Napoleon in 1803, and remained there until his death.
 When he was at Charenton, Sade wrote and directed dramas for inmates of the asylum
(though he didn’t write this particular one).
 Sade has a historical link with Marat because he gave a eulogy at Marat’s grave when
Marat was assassinated.
 Read the play carefully, and examine the ways in which W.’s characters, their
actions and words adhere to historical accounts, and in which ways W. adapts or
reviews these conventionally received accounts.
MARAT’S POLITICAL ACTIVISM
 W.’s earliest plays, though abstract, nonetheless bore political content. They posed as a
critique of the middle classes from which W. derived. E.g. The Insurance is about how the
middle classes want to insure against every possible historical accident, and how absurd this
idea is.
 W. often chose to base dramas on politically heroic martyrs. Later, he wrote Trotsky in
Exile (1970), and Hölderlin (1972). All these figures insist on change, in spite of obstacles.
 M/S is more directly concerned with socialist politics than any of W.’s previous plays.
 One of play’s main aims is to assess whether individuals can influence historical
processes.
 W. says Marat represents “the possibility whose impossibility the play violently
demonstrates in the hope that it may yet be possible” (Karlheinz Braun ed., Materialien
zu “Marat/Sade”, p. 112). Marat is voluntarist—like Brechtian or Sartrean characters, he
believes that human will can alter history, and he refuses to surrender or to be passive.
Find examples of this belief in his dialogue.
 How does Marat attempt to impact on society and history?
 Would you describe Marat as a socialist? Why?
 Would you describe him as an idealist? Why?
 Marat spends the entire play in a bathtub that resembles a sarcophagus. What do
you think W. implies by this? (see the “Author’s Note on the Historical Background to
the Play”).
Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus in the British Museum. The resemblance to Marat’s
bathtub is striking.
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 What are Marat’s views on force and violence, and why do you think W. entitles
Scene 11 “Death’s Triumph”?
Brueghel, The Triumph of Death (c. 1562)
 What allusion is W. making by stating that the play takes place in ‘the bath hall of the
asylum. To right and left bathtubs and showers” (p. 12).
An Auschwitz gas chamber. Prisoners were often told they were going to a shower
room, whereas they were led to their deaths.
The Killing Fields of Cambodia
 Marat exclaims, ‘I am the Revolution’ (p. 25). Are there ways in which he’s
egotistical?
WHO IS THE REAL REVOLUTIONARY?
 Perhaps the real, most radical and effective revolutionary protagonist in the play is
the former priest, Jacques Roux. Why do you think this is? Find examples of his support
for the proletariat; his activism; his effectiveness; his refusal to conform; the real
revolutionary threat he poses.
SADE’S SOCIAL PASSIVITY AND INDIVIDUALISM
 Sade’s sentiments echo 20th-century absurdism. He argues that everything in this world is
transient and temporary and ultimately meaningless, so there’s no point trying to make
changes; they’ll lead to nothing. As Marat states, for Sade “the animating force of Nature is
destruction / and … our only instrument for measuring life is death” (p. 31). W. himself writes:
I had simply not learned enough. I wondered what it was like to plunge the knife into a
living body and to hear the crunch of bones, or to have a knife thrust into your own ribs
or your own throat; I tried to imagine how it felt when the blood burst out of your throat
or when your abdomen was a mutilated steaming mess, or what the split second was
like when the bullet struck your head. … I saw them creeping up on one another, the
brave ones, friend and foe, the cannon-fodder of shifting ideals, how they murdered
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one another, how they found allies to attack others whom they then joined in order to
fall upon new adversaries (Leavetaking and Vanishing Point, pp. 132-33).
 Find examples in Sade’s own dialogue of this absurdism, pessimism, scepticism
and rejection of Enlightenment reason and logic.
 W. explains this when he describes main concepts behind his play:
We have seen so many revolutionary countries where the results of the revolution didn’t
really appeal to the original meaning and goal of revolution. Goals such as freedom of
thought, the freedom of art have not been achieved in many counties in the degree in
which it was planned from the original revolutionary view. This is the point Sade makes
very clear in the play, that he doesn’t believe in revolution as long as it does not free the
individual at the same time. Revolution is his whole being, and art must free itself too. So
these two points of view—Marat’s absolute commitment to revolution and Sade’s other
view—are very clearly stated in the play, and this feeling of ambiguity is not only typical
for me but I think for many modern artists and playwrights (‘Interview with Peter Weiss’,
p. 158).
Find examples in Sade’s dialogue of how he feels that the Enlightenment and
“progress” have simply brought about more tyranny and suffering.
 Find examples in Sade’s dialogue of his lack of faith in political movements,
common ethics, social or political programmes or solidarity movements.
 Find examples in Sade’s dialogue of his belief that all humans are driven by purely
selfish motivations.
 Who do you think is more realistic and honest, out of Sade and Marat?
 Because for Sade the most important kind of revolution is at the level of the individual,
individual creativity becomes key. W. was very influenced by the Swedish playwright August
Strindberg, who uses dream and hallucination in his plays, and W. translated Strindberg’s Miss
Julie¸ The Father, A Dream Play. Strindberg found political revolution to be too narrow, and
instead espoused the idea of personal existential rebellion bordering on anarchy. never
compromised ideas of individualism and creativity.
 How does W. embody these ideas in the figure of Sade?
 Would you describe Sade as an unadulterated pessimist? If he’s so antisocial, why
does he engage in so public and collective an artistic form as theatre?
THE BRECHTIAN INFLUENCE
 W.’s theatre is innovative and rich in terms of its political and existential content. It’s also
rich in terms of its form, which is highly experimental. Artistic innovation is central to W.’s
concept of revolution. The artists he most admires are those who are radical, who are
“saboteurs”, “destroyers of the home”, and who push boundaries, even if their work isn’t fully
understood or appreciated by the society contemporary to them. He writes of the artists he
admires most:
they didn’t propose solutions, but they always stood at the beginning of a process.
They tried to grow and keep exploring. And the more conformist the world became, the
more this unrespectable, rebellious art came to be a living reality. We too need such
strong artistic statements once again—in our self-satisfied, complacent, and sleepy
condition!’ (“Avantgarde Film”, p. 305).
 W. very successfully combines various dramatic styles. He’s clearly influenced by Brecht’s
concept of theatre as an incentive to rational political thinking, and also by Antonin Artaud’s and
Alfred Jarry’s concepta of theatre as the expression of irrational, inexplicable impulses.
 W. employs numerous Brechtian dramatic techniques:
 Find examples of how he prevents emotion and suspense.
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 Find examples of the modernist fragmentation of narrative.
 Find examples of the Brechtian juxtaposition of different styles and media.
 Find examples of W.’s use of self-conscious theatricality (shattering the theatrical
illusion and highlighting the play’s artifice).
 To what effect does W. use the play-within-the-play?
 M/S was performed in various cities in Italy by the inmates of Volterra prison between 1993
and 1997. So this added yet another layer of ambiguity to the play-within-the-play. Are the
actors speaking as Sade’s characters, as Charenton inmates, or as real prisoners?
THE ARTAUDIAN INFLUENCE AND PETER BROOK’S PRODUCTION
 W. states explicitly that he’s influenced by Artaud (“Interview with Peter Weiss”, in The
Playwrights Speak, p. 156). W. is also influenced by Ionesco, whose theatre contains Artaudian
elements.
 W. says he wants to show that behind the propriety and rationality of ruling middle classes,
there’s animality and sexuality:
There was Antonin Artaud the forerunner of today’s absurdists: Ionesco, Adamov,
Beckett. He wanted a theatre of cruelty, and by this he meant a theatre in which the
audience would be exposed to psychic shock. … He had wanted a ruthless hard style,
had tried to bring the spectator into a state of panic with his unrestrained situations
(“Avantgarde Film”, pp. 298-99).
 W., like Adamov and Ionesco, often incorporates elements of dreams, hallucinations,
madmen’s ravings. Find examples of these in M/S.
 W. loved puppets like Punch and Judy and circus characters because of their lusty,
vigorous and barbarous acts and their lack of decorum and propriety. He writes:
There was no intrigue and no human souls were depicted, the problems were plowed
under by slapsticks and stabs with a knife. Everything happened blow-by-blow. … And
they were all unkillable, they were all only crackable wood, they’d stand right up
against and grin with their chipped faces. The Punch-and-Judy stage stood in the
fairgrounds every year, near the tootling carousel, amidst the shouts of the barkers, the
splendid pictures of Moritat scenes, the Magicians and the Freaks who peopled the
fairway. It was one of the many things which turned the whole spectacle into a
theatrical stage which I’m bringing to life again: The puppet-booth (programme note to
Night with Guests, in Dramen I, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 261-62).
Punch and Judy
Find examples of the influence of puppets in M/S.
 The most famous production of M/S was by one of the 20th century’s greatest directors,
Peter Brook, at the Aldwych Theatre, London, Autumn 1964, and then on Broadway in 1965.
The film version was made in 1966. W. partly owes his international success to Brook.
 Brook’s production was predominantly Artaudian. Artaud’s anti-rationalist theories don’t
necessarily enable historical progress and optimism. Brook tried to project an exclusively
Artaudian reading on play, by seeing it as mainly absurdist and not optimistic. He felt that “the
theatre of doubting, of unease, of trouble, of alarm seems truer than the theatre with a nobler
aim” (Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 45). Brook’s production
mainly affirms Sade’s position, as it emphasises ebullient song, dance, pantomime, comedy,
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clowning, carnivalesque, tragedy, melodrama, lyricism, eroticism, brutality, insanity. Brook’s
production doesn’t stress Marat’s rational discussion as thoroughly as Sade’s side. Therefore,
Brook in effect betrays the dialectical, inconclusive nature of play.
 W. hated Brook’s production, insisting that Artaudian spectacle should never have taken
precedence over the dialectical reasoning in the play. W. writes:
Peter Brook was thinking about Artaud before he produced Marat/Sade, and thus he
used Artaudian techniques. … if there are very strong elements onstage, they
shouldn’t be acted either in a sadistic or a masochistic way, because either one makes
it impossible to analyze the situation (Interview with Paul Gray, “A Living World”, The
Drama Review, 2, no. 1 (Fall 1966), p. 111).
W. thought Brook’s production had “assaulted” the spectator so that the grotesque, Artaudinspired cruelty blurred the political message.
 However, Brook himself states that the great strength of W.’s text lies in the fact that it
combines Artaudian viscerality with Brechtian rationality. Perhaps Brook’s production, though,
failed to communicate this. Brook writes:
Brecht’s use of ‘distance’ has long been considered in opposition to Artaud’s
conception of theatre as immediate and violent subjective experience. I have never
believed this to be true. I believe that theatre, like life is made up of the unbroken
conflict between impressions and judgements—illusions and disillusion cohabit
painfully and are inseparable. This is just what Weiss achieves. Starting with its title,
everything about this play is designed to crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse
him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelligently what has happened to
him, then give him a kick in the balls, then bring him back to his senses again
(“Introduction” [1964], Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, p. 6).
CONCLUSION
 All W.’s plays attempt to find an art form that isn’t just stage magic and formal innovation,
and a political dimension that isn’t just realist. In 1966 he says:
Even if I had the most brilliant theatrical idea, I would never turn it into a play—never,
never—if I could not also make it express a message. … I cannot and do not want to
find refuge in some imaginary artistic no-man’s-land’ (Interview with Oliver Clausen,
pp. 130-31).
FURTHER READING
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1999).
Olaf Berwald, “Staging Writers as Outcasts” and “Poetics and Politics”, in An Introduction to the
Works of Peter Weiss (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 33-38 and 99-107.
Karlheinz Braun ed., Materialien zu “Marat/Sade”, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976).
Robert Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1993), pp. 60-75.
Ruby Cohn, “Marat/Sade: ‘An Education in Theatre’”, Educational Theatre Journal, 19.4 (Dec.
1968).
Suzanne Dieckman, “Levels of Commitment: An Approach to the Role of Weiss’s Marat”,
Educational Theatre Journal, 30.1 (March 1978).
Roger Ellis, “Committed Writing and Marat/Sade”, in Peter Weiss in Exile: A Critical Study of
His Works (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1987), pp. 23-41).
Ian Hilton, Peter Weiss: A Search for Affinities (London: Wolff, 1970).
Michael Patterson, German Theatre Today: Post-War Theatre in West and East Germany,
Austria and Northern Switzerland (London: Pitman, 1976).
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David Roberts, “Marat/Sade, or the Birth of Postmodernism from the Spirit of the Avantgarde”
New German Critique, 38 (Spring 1986).
Walter Wager, ed., “Interview with Peter Weiss”, in The Playwrights Speak (London:
Longmans, 1969).
Peter Weiss, “Interview”, in Walter Wager, ed., The Playwrights Speak (London: Longmans,
1969), pp. 150-168.
“Avantgarde Film”, Akzente 10 (April 1955).
“The Material and the Models: Notes Towards a Definition of Documentary Theatre”
[1968], in George W. Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on
Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 247-253).
John J. White, “History and Cruelty in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade”, The Modern Language
Review, 63.2 (Apr. 1968).
When looking for materials in the university library, think laterally: search not only under
the author’s and text’s names, but also under key words related to the text. E.g. for
Bertolt Brecht, you could search under “German drama”; “twentieth-century German
theatre”; “art and war in Nazi Germany”; “political theatre”, etc. You can also conduct
online searches for materials using Literature Online and Jstor (available via the
university library website – click “Databases”). Again, think laterally if you don’t
immediately find relevant resources.
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