What happens when the asylum runs the inmates
Soulpepper’s Marat/Sade finds that all the world’s a cage, while Motown’s musical tribute swings to the sounds of the ’60s
There can be few dramatic titles more generously informative than 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. That, or its German equivalent, is the banner under which Peter Weiss’s play was first performed in Berlin in 1964. The same year it was done in London, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, who understandably wanted something snappier on the marquee. So, the play became Marat/Sade, and at least in the English-speaking theatre, it has remained.
The RSC did more than change the title. They changed the nature of the play. Weiss wrote a dialectical drama: an imaginary conversation between Marat — one of the blooodthirstier idealists of the French Revolution, stabbed in his bath in 1793 — and the mordant hedonist de Sade — and added the frisson of setting it in a madhouse. The historical de Sade was indeed confined to the Charenton asylum during the Napoleonic era, and while there he organized theatrical performances as therapy for himself and his fellow inmates. His debate with Marat is presented as one of those psychodramas, the Marquis playing himself, the other patients playing everybody else. The British production, a virtuoso staging by Peter Brook, took the play-within-a-play and spectacularly ran with it. The setting became the subject. The asylum took over the lunatics.
Soulpepper’s production, directed by Albert Schultz, follows in many of Brook’s footsteps. It uses the same translation, credited to Geoffrey Skelton with “verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell.” Mitchell’s contribution was crucial; he put much of the text into snappy, and often funny, rhyming couplets. (Of Marat and his partner Simonne Everard: “They shared one vision of the just and true / And furthermore, they shared her money too.”) The show’s entertainment value was further enhanced by its score; the play became virtually a musical. At Soulpepper, it’s virtually an opera. What were once speeches have become songs, set by Mike Ross in a radiant panoply of styles, with only one misfire: a song purporting to bring us up to date, or to 1808, on French history has been set too choppily for the facts to be clear. It all provides another impressive demonstration of the Soulpepper company’s musical talents, vocal and instrumental.
Trouble i s, the people they’re playing aren’t supposed to be skilled professionals; they aren’t even supposed to be competent. The confusion’s compounded by the addition of an extra frame to a play that already has more than enough. We’re told that it’s being performed for us by contemporary Canadian mental patients who, in a device that might have alienated Bertolt Brecht himself, have to do all their acting behind bars; the stage is a cage. As in Soulpepper’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, new topical references have been written in, including a shout-out, or shout-in, to the company itself; it may mean to be provocative, but it comes over as cosy.
We lose the sense of de Sade directing his play as we watch; in Diego Matamoros’ performance he’s just another character in a pre-written drama, and a distant one, kept remote and upstage. He only comes into his own in his culminating speech to Marat on the futility of revolution, here re-cast as a song in the manner of Brecht and Hanns Eisler. There’s a tortured power in Stuart Hughes’ Marat and a perky wit in Oliver Dennis’ herald-narrator; neither of them gives any indication of mental illness, but considering the amount of text they have to get through, that’s probably a good thing. The mad ensemble are fine as a group, whether suffering or menacing, but they don’t disturb with their individual obsessions as the Brook actors did. The sleeping sickness of the woman playing Charlotte Corday (Katherine Gauthier) is reduced to an inconsistent running gag; her lover Duperret goes very light on his supposed sex addiction, though Gregory Prest’s performance is otherwise excellent. Unfortunately, their scenes together don’t tell us much, either about their relationship or about Charlotte’s reasons for killing Marat.
That’s the author’s fault. Marat/Sade is a great idea for a play, but that’s all. It’s full of activity but has very little action. Marat and de Sade keep re-stating their positions, neither affecting the other. Charlotte’s three arrivals at Marat’s door are pretentious padding. The chorus keep singing about how the poor stay poor and how they want a revolution now. Finally they attempt one, their real and theatrical identities merging, but are brought to heel by the asylum authorities. Schultz’s updating suggests that the inmate-performers are political protesters, imprisoned by the Canadian government. That may be fine, but it doesn’t justify a grossly sentimental new ending. The London version, as I remember, ended with the cast giving the audience the finger. I’d probably hate that now, but it seemed like fun at the time.
Motown The Musical, unlike most juke-box entertainments, spotlights not a performer or composer but a producer: Berry Gordy, founder of the eponymous label, the man who wrote the book. In fact, he wrote it twice; his own script is based on his own memoir. The dialogue is unbelievably wooden, but the show is rather well constructed, tracing the Detroit company’s rise, triumph and commercial fall, all while doing a reasonable job of linking it to the politics of the ’60s and ’70s. Gordy must have discovered or promoted every important black act of the time, from Smokey Robinson (portrayed as his boss’s glorified gofer) to the Jackson 5, and we get to hear most of the hits, snazzily framed and solidly sung with moves that likely surpass the originals. The songs in the first half sound better than those in the second, but that could just be my nostalgia kicking in.