The at 50 Article Forum 1966

MIT Press
Marat/Sade Forum
Author(s): Peter Brook, Leslie Fiedler, Geraldine Lust, Norman Podhoretz, Ian Richardson and
Gordon Rogoff
Source: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer, 1966), pp. 214-237
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125221
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Marat/ Sade Forum
PETER BROOK
LESLIE FIEDLER
GERALDINE LUST
NORMAN PODHORETZ
IAN RICHARDSON
GORDON ROGOFF
Geraldine Lust, Director of Artaud Workshop II, and Lynn Michaels

and Harry Baum of the St. Marks Playhouse sponsored a midnight
forum at the Playhouse on January 28 to discuss "the relevancy of the
Marat/Sade production, achieved through its fusion of Artaudian and
Brechtian techniques, to the revolutionary currents of our time." The
panelists are listed above: Mr. Brook is the director of the Royal
Shakespeare Company production of Peter Weiss's play, which re-
ceived brilliant notices for both its London run and its limited engage-
ment in New York; lan Richardson plays Marat in that production;
Leslie Fiedler, the critic and novelist, is now teaching at the University
of Buffalo; Norman Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary; Gordon
RogofJ, the critic, has just been appointed Associate Dean of the Yale
Drama School and is TDR's Associate Editor. The audience included
many theatre professionals, and Mr. Rogoff moderated.
Lust: The Marat/Sade production seems to me a primer for the kind

of theatre to come; a harbinger of plays that will reflect the human
condition at its core. These plays will reveal the psychology under-
lying our myths and societies, rather than be a narrow description of
MORRIS NEWCOMBE
Sade interruptsCorday as she is about to murder Marat.

Royal Sliakespeare Company production, 1965.
214
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216 Tulane Drama Review
individual behavior. I asked all of you, and others who could not be
present, to come and pay homage to this unusual production.
There is no intention here of disputation or criticism in the journal-
istic sense. The play is so rich, so broad in its range of contemporary
concerns, that we have invited prominent individuals in disciplines other
than theatre. We hope that comments will be made about consciousness
expansion, the resurgence of the irrational, national loyalties, the revo-
lutions in education, sex, and technology, religious disenchantment and
contrasting ecumenical movements. Also political revolutions and the
Negro Freedom Movement. The play touches on all of these.
Brook: One starts by asking if there is any remote sense in a group
coming together like this. We will reach no conclusions during the
coming hours. So let's abandon anything as meaningless as that. One
sees in the play's action the uncomfortable, irritating ambiguity Peter
Weiss felt because he was writing an unresolved play, which to me was
its virtue and its force.
Mr. Brook went on to point out how "unspeakably bad, boring, and
incompetent" most theatre was. "Not even worth a breath of discus-
sion." Most theatre-going is inertia, he said. He thought the "only
question" that illuminates all the aesthetic issues is, "Why do we go to
the theatre at all?" He suggested that the discussion center around that
consideration. Mr. Rogojf told of a talk he once had with Judith
Malina of the Living Theatre in which she said that one went to the
theatre so that afterwards one would go out in the streets and break
windows: begin a revolution. Someone in the audience asked Mr.
Rogoff what windows he broke after seeing Marat/Sade.
Rogoff: None. I'm very controlled. I wanted to say, "Yes, the revolu-
tion now!" But I didn't.
Brook: It puts you falsely on the spot to say that if you didn't do any-
thing you've not had a true experience. This seems to be a great myth:
that experience goes in through here and sits on the stomach, like
spaghetti. It's a nineteenth-century idea of experience.
Rogoff: I raised the question rhetorically. I don't agree with Judith
Malina that I have to leave the theatre and make a revolution. What
I seek in the theatre is a communal experience joined to a most per-
sonal one. I believe what John Arden said several years ago: theatre
MARAT/SADE FORUM 217
will never change a society, at most it will confirmpeople in what they

are beginningto believe.
Podhoretz:Certainlywhat Mr. Brook called the unresolvedcharacter
of the play is its most prominent feature; and it's the nature of this
kind of art that it doesn'tlead to action. This is not Waitingfor Lefty.
What struck me most was that the Marat/Sade managed to invest
an enormous amount of force and power in the expression of two
sets of attitudeswhich are already very familiar to us: the confronta-
tion between the classical, radical political position identified with
Marat and the nihilisticview of political action representedby Sade.
Mr. Fiedler prefaced his disagreement with Mr. Podhoretz' position by
asserting that he was at the panel "under false pretenses, because I
don't really believe in the theatre any more." As a boy he loved
theatre and thought, for a time, that he would become an actor. He
recalled the days when he would sneak into theatres for the second and
third acts. There he found "the sentimentalities of my own kind of life
acted out in Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing: the American
theatre before it hardened into paralysis." Mr. Fiedler felt that "there
MORRIS NEWCOMBE
Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.
is no mass audience for theatre." Long ago he gave up his theatrical

ambitions. "And I confess, therefore, that it is in the role of professor
that I appear before you tonight; somebody who wants to see this
whole thing in the context of history and guard it with a kind of cyni-
cism which I don't think is very noble, but which is endemic to my pro-
fession."
Fiedler: The Marat/Sade moved me deeply, moved me first of all be-

cause as an old would-be actor I get an immense joy out of seeing
something well done. I recognized in the play echoes of Brecht and
Artaud, Pirandello and Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida. My head
is full of that play today, because I am teaching it; and I discovered
that the only comment on Troilus that makes sense are those few words
from Artaud when he reminds us that the theatre is here to remind
us that the sky might fall on our heads at any moment. The Marat/Sade
is like that.
I was especially moved by the play because it is congruous to a
world in which I am particularly uncomfortable. I don't know whether
that sounds masochistic. But the play presents a world which I did not
consciously make and yet for which I feel somehow responsible.
On my trip here from Buffalo I thought of the Road Vultures, a
gang of kids who were just picked up by the police in Buffalo. The
Road Vultures are represented by their accoutrements and slogans:
they ride motorcycles and wear black leather jackets, they smoke
pot (this was the occasion for the raid). On the walls of their house
are pictures of Hitler and the killers of all the American presidents.
On the tables are Communist and Maoist literature. Inscribed on the
wall, cutting across the pictures, is the slogan, "Death to the fascist
fuzz." Evidence has been uncovered that apparently the Road Vultures
had some kind of liaison-which must have been an embarrassment
on both sides-with the local chapter of Students for a Democratic
Society.
The meaning of the Road Vultures seems to me very much like
one of the meanings of Marat/Sade-I find in them a refreshing and
terrifying confounding of old political categories, a confusion of the
classical Right and the classical Left. And especially I find a rejection
of what the Left has become; for instance, the sentimental identifica-
tion with John F. Kennedy-that kind of faceless success symbol
manufactured by prep schools, ivy league colleges, and PR experts-

which ex-radicals of my own generation have fallen into so abysmally
and pitifully. I find myself thinking, as I reflect on the Road Vultures
and the Marat/Sade, that anyone who really hates, as I pretend to
myself on most days, the indignities of living in the comfortable world
which I inhabit, must in his heart find it much easier to identify with
Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, those real Mama's boy nuts, with
those absolute lunatics, with their fantasies. You know, Ruby is sit-
ting in jail now thinking that they're killing all the Jews because he
failed to become the revolutionary leader of the Jewish Left against
the Communist Right which killed Kennedy. Anybody who doesn't
really find it easier in his heart to identify with Ruby and Oswald
rather than with Kennedy is not really honest in claiming to be disaffili-
ated with the world in which we live.
I find in the Road Vultures and their posters and the Marat/Sade and
its implicit slogans a kind of revolt, rejection, disaffiliation which goes
far beyond that old, weary, dull alienation which people have been talk-
ing about for so long. We now move into a territory as new as that
which the schizophrenic inhabits when he makes his great jump. I'm
not saying, please understand, that the position which is represented
by a certain tendency in the Marat/Sade (and by the meanings I find
in the Road Vultures) is my own position. But I feel that if I want to
stay alive in this world I must come to understand that position and
open in my own head a dialogue with everything I have traditionally
called unreason and madness.
Now let me be clear about what I like in the Weiss play, and what
I don't. I don't approve of Marat's politics, a defense of terror which
makes my skin curl. Marat stands for the Final Solution: you must
identify the enemy and kill enough of them, which means more and
more and more and more. There comes out of that side of the Weiss
play-just as there comes out of the Road Vultures-a Left-flavored
Nazism which really chills my blood. In the play the bourgeoisie is
substituted for the Jews, but anyhow the Jews were substituted for the
bourgeoisie by the Nazis. Aesthetically I don't like the pretentious
banality of the Brechtian chorus. To be banal is all right and to be
pretentious is bearable on some occasions, but to pretend that by be-
ing banal you're being something more really bugs me. More than
that I hate the sense of chic-the anti-humanism of the play is all too
fashionable at the moment. People take sides not on the basis of the
aesthetic merits of the play, but on how it stands on this issue. There
is an unsufferable sense of self-righteousness in people who have gath-
ered to love the play.
What I do like are all those lovely instruments on the stage; those
great noises, and the big wooden things that are so versatile. I like
the twitching and gibbering of the nuts, the buckets of white, blue, and
red blood, and, excuse me, the bare ass of Marat.
In a Shakespearean play a fool walks out on stage and converses
with sane people. This is the Renaissance form of the dialogue be-
tween madness and sanity. In a Euripidean play, a maddening and
a self-maddened God communicates with ordinary sane mortals. The
odd thing about the Marat/Sade play is that the lonely man on stage
is the only sane man there: the Marquis de Sade. Sade is sane because
he has come to terms with the madness within himself; he stands
outside of his own madness instead of twitching with it or sinking
into catatonic immobility because of it. This is Sade's play, of course.
The play which is a play about a play is an entertainment which sub-
verts the official theory of the asylum, which, I regret to say, is the
official theory of Artaud-that art is therapeutic. Artaud thought that
maybe war could be eliminated by the theatre of cruelty.
But Sade's secret theory is that art is an excitement. Remember that
Sade was in the Bastille until two days before the Fourteenth of July,
yelling incendiary slogans; he really moved people to action. We must
imagine him as triumphant during the eruption of lunacy at the play's
end.
Actually we do not move out of the theatre in a howling mob be-
cause we are not "the people," who alone can make that mob. The
people, in fact, are finding satisfaction in Thunderball or at Beatles
movies where they do break a few heads and seats. But we are good,
solid, bourgeois onlookers. At the end of the play the actors move on
us, the audience. There must be a good deal of latent hostility to-
wards the audience because actors and audience are natural enemies.
Those people on stage-lunatics who are acting us-are blown out of
MORRIS NEWCOMBE
all those convolutions of make-believe and into the darkness across

the apron of the stage to attack us who are on the outside.
Richardson: We very carefully improvised the ending. It's rather
curious and frightening that when we reach that part of the play
something deep down does tend to take over. We have had actual
physical violence of a very serious sort breaking out: there's been
real blood up there, fractured teeth, unconscious people. I found it
necessary for me to completely withdraw to the safety of the prosce-
nium arch because I was sensible of my obligations the rest of the
week.
There is at the end a fully-concentrated chemistry and if it con-
vinces you, that certainly satisfies me on behalf of my colleagues.
Mr. Rogoff pointed out that he thought it wrong to "ascribe to the
playwright the events of the play." Mr. Fiedler responded that he was
speaking as that "ultimate outsider," the author, "who really knows
what he sometimes tends to lie about in public, that he cannot write
anything which he does not in some sense believe."
Brook: Surely what's interesting is that there are two completely dis-
tinct Peter Weisses. There is a man who at a moment in his life was
so wracked by the absolute impossibility of making sense of his own
contradictions that he lived through an immense transformation, with
everything Sade means. He emerged from his sadistic period to face
a world which appalled him; so he swung into politics. Here, every
argument he gave even momentary belief to dissolved, and he came
back to the Sade-like view that it is all different forms of subjective
limitation-there's no way out. Weiss couldn't resolve the contradic-
tion, and in that state of mind he wrote a play in which everything
expressed is just like taking his head and opening it and giving it to
you on a plate.
Podhoretz: But Weiss, after he finished the play, began to make public
statements about where his political commitments lay. The act of writ-
ing may have been to him a useful experiment. I don't see, as Leslie
Fiedler does, a dialogue between sanity and madness. I don't take the
madness of the play that seriously. The play is largely about politics:
it is the dark night of the soul of a Marxist, or possibly a Communist,
or of a revolutionist at least. The arguments about terror, the effort
to update the whole business,are clearly related to present-dayevents.

It's not a question of sanity or madness, but of whether or not you
believe in this kind of terror based on ideology, whether you think it
can clean up the world.
Questionfrom audience:Mr. Brook,did you conceive of Sade as mad or
sane?
Brook: If you can tell me the differenceI could answeryour question.
In fact, I think that's an absolutely impossible and, if I may say so,
meaninglessseparation.The only personwe used as a concreteequiva-
lent to Sade was Ezra Pound.
Questionfrom audience:Then would you say that there is no dialogue
betweensanityand madness?
Brook:It dependson where you think this dialoguelies. You see, what's
strikingis that the audienceis presentedwith a range of views, and the
chances are that they will have instinctivesympathywith at least one
of them. What the play offers is a very disagreeablenotion: everyone
in the play, because he isn't a true actor, but a madman playing an
MORRIS NEWCOMBE
The four singers. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.
actor, believes totally in his part. Look at the difference. An actor

playing a role can just switch off like that. Right in the middle of his
most ravaging scene, if you say, "Oh, that's a lot of shit," he'll answer,
"Yes, it is, isn't it?"-and then go right back into it. But a madman
continues in his self-imposed role until the end. You go into an asylum
and you say, "You're not Napoleon"-but you can't get through, you
don't shake that absolute belief in the part.
This play presents the notion of sanity and madness in a very
disturbing way. You follow an argument that begins to appear ob-
jective; then you see that there is no chink of difference in the degree
with which each one of those people believes in his position: so com-
pletely that he will kill for it. And this is a dialogue that forces you
into a continual awareness of the relative value of extreme and absolute
positions.
Fiedler: The play is a test of one's responses. My initial sympathy goes
to Sade. But making allowances for that and attempting to discuss the
thing in terms of the play's text, we see that everyone has had their
lines written for them by Sade. Charlotte Corday has to be prompted,
Marat is undergoing hydro-therapy. There is, therefore, a difference in
the text-never mind what Weiss himself would say outside it-be-
tween Sade playing Sade and a man who is empirically identified as a
paranoic playing Marat. Nobody teaches Sade his lines; Sade never
forgets his lines and never has to be prompted-that's what makes the
dialogue seem so uneven and unequal.
Let's avoid the terms sanity and madness, if we find those upsetting.
But in the play itself there is a difference between Sade's position and
the position he puts in the mouths of everyone else.
Podhoretz: If anyone wins the debate, it's Marat.
Fiedler: Sade has to win because he's written Marat's lines.
Question from audience: I would like to ask a technical question, be-
cause if the roles were prepared differently the effect would be dif-
ferent. What's behind Sade's character? Is he a stranger in the asylum?
As author of the play within the play, why did he write it? What's his
relation to Coulmier?
Brook: Anyone playing Sade has a much easier task than the other
actors because he has good material given to him. Just the sort of
questions you ask are answered historically. Sade knows from the books
he wrote exactly what he has been thinking about for the thirty years
before the play starts. We know what events brought him to Charenton.
He was let out of the Bastille, an arrogant, angry, and contemptuous
aristocrat. Revolutionary circles first welcomed and then tolerated him.
Coulmier was a fascinating, self-defrocked abbe, ran a very fashionable,
go-getting asylum. Sade was put away not because he was crazy but
because he was a social misfit. Sade's I.Q. level made him the only
person Coulmier could chat with. Coulmier let Sade keep his mistress
at the asylum, calling her his niece.
All of this reveals that Sade had a relationship with Coulmier that
was part friendship, part suspicion, largely dislike. This is realistic
character material which the actor, as in any realistic or naturalistic
play, can build his role on. But the real material for Sade is there in
two passages in the play:
Sade. Before decidingwhat is wrong and what is right
firstwe must find out what we are
I
do not know myself
No sooner have I discoveredsomething
than I begin to doubt it
and I have to destroy it again
As soon as Sade asserts something, a deeper honesty compels him to
question it.
Marat, who also speaks largely with Marat's own historical words,
is continually affirming absolute things and this is what Sade feels must
be questioned. I think the action of the play is that Sade honestly gives
rein to an opponent whom he respects only if he can feed him the best
possible material. The other passage is:
Marat. The importantthing

is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes
Sade is not cheating. Marat is given a fantastically powerful statement,
and yet, you see, implied in the title, Sade feels, in the name of honesty,
impelled and compelled to persecute and assassinate that attitude.
A woman in the audience (she acted in The Blacks) said she had done
HILDEGARD LEVERMANN-WESTERHOLZ
Marat and inmates. Rostock production, 1964.
her "homework" and studied Artaud. "Is the Marat/Sade the Theatre
of Cruelty?" she asked.
Brook: Artaud offers certain limited, specific-almost technical-things,
of great originality and importance to the theatre. Important because
there is a chain in this century that goes on the one hand through
Stanislavski and on the other through Meyerhold, leading to Brecht
and to Artaud. One can oversimplify, and say that Artaud is related
to a non-rational, non-verbal, non-intellectual theatre, and that Brecht
is related to an intellectually lucid theatre. That's a simplification both
ways. You should take Artaud unadulterated as a way of life, or say
that there is something in Artaud that relates to a style of theatre.
That's Artaud's only relationship with this particular kind of play.
One must be careful not to pass something off as Artaud which really
isn't.
Someone asked if Artaud was the Marat of the theatre. Mr. Fiedler
replied, "No, he's the Sade of the theatre." Mr. Fiedler went on to say
that although Weiss is not Artaudian, Sade in Weiss's play is: "Sade
lives the role as well as acting it out." Mr. Fiedler thought the play
was a dialogue about the nature of art. Coulmier has the physician's
attitude: psychodrama can heal. But Sade thinks of art as something that
will further alienate people, "driving them to embrace their madness."
At the play's end, Sade is triumphant. A person in the audience noted
that one could find a good deal of Marat in Sade and vice-versa. The
panelists agreed that the "dialogues tend to melt into each other to pro-
duce a totality." Mr. Brook then spoke about the technique of the play-
within-the-play:
Brook: If Sade was today in an asylum and wanted to write a play
against Fascism, and found that he had a fellow inmate who believed
deeply in the preachings of Adolph Hitler, then obviously he would
allow this patient leeway in what he had to say, and probably allow
him to say a lot of things which Hitler actually said. By giving the
part to someone who believes and is capable of quoting those beliefs,
he heightens the tension and the possible sadistic opportunities for
himself. First and foremost he must cast the part of Marat very care-
fully to make sure that this is going to pay off.
What is so extraordinary about this is that when you see other
plays, with actors playing given lines, and engaging in make-believe
fights, struggles, and arguments, you just sit there, not disturbed; you
accept the fact that the actor is playing. Now the situation here, once
Marat begins to speak, is no different than if Ian were playing Shylock,
except that in one case the author is sitting on stage reminding you
that this is an actor playing lines, while in the other the author is in
his box at Stratford. Marat's lines are played by another person; we
don't know his name, but he is a madman who for this purpose is an
actor. That's no different from anybody playing any play anywhere
else.
A person in the audience said that the problem in the Marat/Sade was
different than that of The Taming of the Shrew or Six Characters in
Search of an Author. Brook disagreed. "What about The Blacks?"
someone asked.
Brook: The thing that brings the two plays together is their relation to
the audience. The only genuinely interesting dialogue is one induced
between the actors and the audience. We all know that dialogue in the
literal sense-people getting up in the audience and shouting at the
stage-does nothing. But there is certainly something that really ap-

proximates dialogue, when what comes from the stage can provoke a
shift in the audience.
I saw The Blacks in Paris, and I saw The Blacks in this theatre. In
Paris, because of the political, racial situation, the play was completely
theoretical: a rather pompous and boring overwritten piece of romantic
theatre. Here I found it of extraordinary interest. I was conscious that
the performance I was at was necessarily different from the perform-
ance the night before, and the night after; that the proportion of black
and white people in the audience conditioned all sorts of tensions
coming to and from stage and audience, so that one was held telepathi-
cally by either the concerted feelings or the contradictory feelings of
the people around one. One's own feelings were fed and disturbed in
this way; the play was continually shifting its position. The richness of
what was gradually engendered was very close to what I mean by
dialogue. Dialogue of a non-verbal sort, made by a quick-shifting, ever-
moving exchange.
And I think the Marat/Sade works this way in New York, perhaps
more so than in London. In London too many of the themes are un-
interesting; there is more of a theatrical spectacle. Here it's a more
interesting play, because there is a more complicated and dangerous
shifting between the two protagonists: the play and the audience.
Question from audience: When I saw it, I wondered why people didn't
get up at the end and shout, "You bastards, what are you doing to us?
We disagree!"
Brook: I sincerely hope that never happens, because at that stage we
are ready for all hell to break loose.
Mr. Brook talked about his experimental London season called "The
Theatre of Cruelty," in which he explored Artaudian techniques. He
pointed out that audience habits are difficult to break, and sometimes
amusing to explore. At the end of one performance God Save the Queen
was played, but with this innovation: the tape was looped so that no
sooner was the anthem completed then it began again. "The interesting
thing was," Mr. Brook said, "that it took two complete rounds before
the audience realized they were being fooled. The second time through
they thought that it was a terrible mistake and they weren't going to
embarrass us by drawing attention to it. When the third time came
around they began to move toward the door very painfully, fighting
against an umbilical cord that told them to stand still." A person in the
audience said that he felt a distinct and positive audience reaction to
Roux' pacifist speech urging resistance against leaders who sent people
off to useless war. The Vietnamese situation definitely played into the
audience's consciousness. Brook said the reaction varied from night
to night; and someone remembered an opposite reaction on one occa-
sion. Mr. Brook then asked what his production meant to American
theatre people: "What kind of theatre do you want?"
Statement from audience: Just to see thirty actors willing to subordinate
their craft and their egos to the demands of a play to the extent that
these actors did in that evening is to me an important lesson for our
theatre.
Brook: Suppose we were doing The School for Scandal, would that have
touched the same nerve?
This discussion continued for quite some time, and periodically re-
turned during the rest of the night. It was clear that the audience-
which included many of America's leading professionals-was unable
to formulate or articulate what it wanted from the theatre. They liked
the Marat/Sade, but in no way could they say why it might become
a model for their own work. It was distressingly clear that, among this
audience at least, there was no strong feeling about what theatre
should be, what its purposes were, or how to relate the electric pro-
duction of Marat/Sade to the American theatrical experience.
Fiedler: An important point has been made, which we are losing. The
Marat/Sade and The Blacks are plays in which the audience is made
an actor in the play. At the very beginning of the Marat/Sade, as
Monsieur and Madame Coulmier move through the audience, we are
cast as invited friends of these good bourgeois, with liberal ideas.
Similarly, in The Blacks we were cast as whites. If there are tensions
in the audience which pull against the parts for which we've been cast-
for instance, the night I saw The Blacks more than half the house was
black-there is confusion. Thus if there are too many sadists or too
many Maratists, and not enough good liberal bourgeois, the Marat/Sade
is going to fail. It will have committed one of the elementary errors of
theatre: miscasting.
DAVID POWERS
The Coulmier family watches the play, with Simonne Evrard at their feet.
The play aims at conversion. But if the audience becomes con-

verted too completely, the play fails. At the end of this play, if you
are not offended by what happens, the play doesn't work. That is why
I like the play's ultimate strategy, that applause which was supposed
to cut through the applause of the audience and push us back into a
defensive position again. I heard enough muttering around me to
know that it worked.
Several people in the audience agreed that the Marat/Sade, like The
Blacks, "assaulted" its audience: forced an "experience" on the spec-
tators.
Brook: A violent experience given to a passive, captive audience-
whether it's in the underground movie, the happening, the theatre-
is a notion which is implied in much of the praise you are giving to
this particular performance: if an audience can be raped thoroughly
then both sides have done their job. This seems to me very open to
question. It reflects a sterile, sex-starved virginity. Anything is better
than that, thus rape seems so desirable that one can't look beyond it.
But it is here that the question really presents itself. There are two
very different experiences which start off the same way. You start with
the fact that a vital performance-by that I mean one in which a lot
of energy is engendered by stage events-is better than a deadly one.
If the audience is the open vessel ready to take all this stuff in, the
experience stops at that pure drug experience. What comes out of
this is another possibility: the audience comes back to the play and
takes from it what truly concerns it. There's no doubt that the focus
that comes from an audience interested in a special way in what is
happening on stage affects the actor and his performance.
This happens with any rich text, with Shakespeare. With the Marat/
Sade, there is a political disquiet, thank God, in a large section of the
audience, which means that our actors, when they come to lines that
relate to the horrors of useless war, say them in a different way in this
country than in England. The moment the word "war" is said, some-
thing in each person ceases to be completely passive and begins to go
toward that spotlight which changes the actor's deliberative timing, his
authority.
All that has been said tonight in a way is an accusation of some-
thing in your audience's situation, because it doesn't seem to me that
any of you have clearly defined wishes for more information on the
many broad areas that the play deals with. The play is exactly as this
evening's conversation has reflected it: an act of aggression from the
stage which produces certain contradictory queries, which don't go very
far. A political door is opened, the corridor is very short, and it's closed
again. A question of madness, but that doesn't relate to me as an in-
dividual. The play is jolting, but its relation to life is not used because
there doesn't seem to be any concerted wish to get concrete. Is that
unfair?
Statement from audience: If we want to be moved about the war we go
other places.
Brook: Where?
Answer from audience: Nobody expects that the theatre should be able
to speak about anything other than theatrical concerns.
Brook: Do you go to the theatre to be moved? Is that an aim in itself?
Someone wondered whether the Marat/Sade was a special case. He
RONNIE
MEN=
--- - --m
MARAT/SADEFORUM 233
asked Mr. Brook to relate his assertions to his production of King

Lear.
Brook: King Lear is a simple case, the richest field there's ever been
for an audience-or the dullest. We did the play austerely. We did
nothing to help the audience's excitement, because the real riches
of Lear can only be caught if you go towards them with concern for
what the whole play's about. It is easy to do a Lear that is moving,
but that is not the play of Lear. Lear is either something too difficult
and harsh and austere to be other than long and boring, or it's exactly
about everybody's minute-to-minute concerns of the most intimate
kind. We had the very interesting experience of playing Lear from
England through Europe to Moscow and then through this country
to New York, and found that the quality of the performance depended
on the quality of the audience, and that depended on its interest in the
subject matter.
Mr. Fiedler thought that Lear and the Marat/Sade presented two dis-
tinct kinds of assault, and that Mr. Brook had tended to confuse them.
The Marat/Sade is a reaction against "a particular kind of apathy and
deadness in today's audience. . . the assault of the play is against all
those preconceptions and easy allegiances" one holds in one's day-to-
day existence. Marat/Sade, Mr. Fiedler thought, focuses on our ex-
treme experiences, political and intellectual, while Lear is centered. He
thought that Lear embodied some of what Pirandello meant when he
said that "the whole body of my work is my revenge on the world for
the indignity of having been born."
Lust: I have worked a good many years in theatre, and I find that it is
a communal experienrce. People may come together as strangers, but
they must not go away as strangers. This kind of fear is a waste not
only of our energy but also of our beauty. It's an Artaudian concept
that all fear can be deposited in the theatre. I also believe that theatre
can illuminate our death as well as our life. This leads me a step further:
there is both large theatre and small theatre, and large theatre is very
HILDEGARD LEVERMANN-WESTERHOLZ
Corday wandering through the streets of Paris.

Rostock production, 1964.
much interfered with now by mass media. Small theatre is reacting

strongly against mass media. Happenings are certainly part of small
theatre. Artaudian theatre is part of small theatre. I think the Marat/
Sade may be the opening of a door into a way to create. For lack of a
better word, I would call this parochial theatre-performances that
take place within a community or a neighborhood, doing the cere-
monies of that particular area for that particular audience.
I don't mean regional theatre, I hope you understand that. These
ceremonies created for their own audience would be repeated from
time to time as an occasion for people to come together again. This
may sound either radical or like utter nonsense; but I think it is directly
connected with what Mr. Brook was asking for, what he was challeng-
ing us to answer. These ceremonial enactments in a central arena would
involve all present in aesthetic and subterranean responses. Parochial
theatre would be a means of interacting again in the theatre. It is al-
most like religion, but it's theatre.
Brook: I think what you say is very dangerous.
Lust: Good.
Brook: It's easy to confuse two things which sound similar, but which
are exactly opposite. The most conventional, boring, bourgeois theatre
takes certain aspects of people's lives and shows them back to the
audience in a way that lulls them into contentment and complacency.
It's easy to take the themes of a group so that the group feels-
because the external trappings are different, smelling of experiment,
vitality, a search for something new-that something has happened.
But nothing has happened.
You use a word like religion. This is an extremely dangerous use of
words, because then the theatre is a religion, and that means that
people, with their limited human experience, are setting themselves
up in direct rivalry with Christ, Mohammed, and Buddha, claiming to
know how to create a ritual that can deeply stir people. If you look
at it closely one sees this as lunacy, hubris, homemade, do-it-yourself
religion. On the other hand one sees the difference between the emo-
tional experience of theatre and the true religious experience. Of course
one can create something quite different: what Wagner created, the
folk religion that uses good religious notions-ritual, gods, super fig-
ures, things out of this world, myths-to produce a device for increas-
ing the audience's sleep, stupidity, and bestiality.
DAVIDPOWERS
The death of Marat. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.
This distinctionmust be made, down to a simple, specific, example

that everybodyworking in the theatre must know only too well: take
any group of actors doing improvisations,and look what happens.
Actors who haven't improvised discover a universe freed from a
stiff, constricted,limited world; they find a range of colors, words,
attitudes,even wit and spontaneity,which they didn't think themselves
capable of. So the first impressionis of a true opening. But anyone
who's worked on improvisationknows how rapidly you come to the
next threshold,when you see that this first freedom, which is a true
freedom, is only a restrictedone. It's the freedom that people allow
themselvesbefore coming to their real inner taboos. You can improvise
for month after month, and year after year and never touch what Sade
calls those really locked inner selves. You have shot rapidly to a pla-
teau, and then you go on waltzing and waltzing and waltzing forever
across this plateau, fooling yourself into thinking that you are going
upwardswhen you'rereallystayingon the same level.
It is very easy for the theatre that seeks the equivalent of improvisa-
tion through shared ritual, through shared exchange of social myths
between actor and audience, to come to that same point, where all
real movement ends.
The actor has to be open, not closed. If he happens to be dumb and
blind he shouldn't apply for the part. Freedom alone doesn't give him
the ability to exchange something with an audience. That ability comes
through the actor's ability to create an object, like any other object,
which exists between him and the audience; something he recognizes
as absolutely true at that moment, and which the audience recognizes.
Through that, an exchange takes place. This needs a different ap-
proach and different training. As the actor works to open, to free him-
self, as you say, every moment he must face some external require-
ment that doesn't correspond to what he feels; it's in that area of
contradiction that he can suddenly create something. Take an actor
playing a great speech of Shakespeare. One half of the actor's work
is to open himself, the other half is to recognize that in a million years
he cannot by himself find the potential object that that speech repre-
sents. The more he works on that speech and the more he realizes
that they aren't his own words, or his own rhythm, the more chance
he has to strike something deeper in himself than he would ever find
through improvising or analysis. He must let the speech itself strike
with its own force the portion of him that's resisting.
Mr. Rogofj, noting that it was nearing three a.m., wished to end the
formal discussion. He remarked that Mr. Brook had correctly prophe-
sized that no conclusions would be reached. Mr. Rogoff thought that
the night's discussion, like the play itself, was a "constant pull and tug
of argument." He wondered whether Weiss himself wanted any resolu-
tions: perhaps the theatrical experience is of an irrational argument
with no conclusions. Mr. Fiedler said that whatever Weiss might say,
he would choose to believe the work and not the author. Mr. Rogoff
thought the Marat/Sade was a "masterpiece of irrationality."
Brook: Those who have come here tonight have come because they
have enjoyed seeing this particular performance. As you try to pull
it to pieces you are destroying your own experience of it, in that you're
proving a lie because you're proving that you didn't like it as much as
you thought you did. Maybe that means that the evening has been a
complete waste of time. Perhaps an experience once received is de-

stroyed by being teased and analyzed. But there is also truth in the
other theme that we've talked about:that there is a suspect,Wagnerian
approachto theatre, which dates back to the man who first invented
the phrase "smashhit," where the notion of experienceis: this on one
side and that on the other. The theatre of assault depends on an in-
telligent willingnessto receive that assault, not on a stupid wish to be
smashed, hit on the head. All these things come up in complete con-
tradiction.I think that one should preservethem as such and not try
to shakehands and kiss and forget.
Rogoff:Good, let's not shakehands.
Edited by RICHARD SCHECHNER
MORRIS NEWCOMBE
Marat dead. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

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MIT Press

Geraldine Lust, Director of Artaud Workshop II, and Lynn Michaels

Lust: The Marat/Sade production seems to me a primer for the kind

Sade interruptsCorday as she is about to murder Marat.

will never change a society, at most it will confirmpeople in what they

Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

is no mass audience for theatre." Long ago he gave up his theatrical

Fiedler: The Marat/Sade moved me deeply, moved me first of all be-

manufactured by prep schools, ivy league colleges, and PR experts-

Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

all those convolutions of make-believe and into the darkness across

to update the whole business,are clearly related to present-dayevents.

The four singers. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

actor, believes totally in his part. Look at the difference. An actor

Marat. The importantthing

Marat and inmates. Rostock production, 1964.

stage-does nothing. But there is certainly something that really ap-

The play aims at conversion. But if the audience becomes con-

Brook: Do you go to the theatre to be moved? Is that an aim in itself?

Someone wondered whether the Marat/Sade was a special case. He

asked Mr. Brook to relate his assertions to his production of King

Corday wandering through the streets of Paris.

much interfered with now by mass media. Small theatre is reacting

The death of Marat. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

This distinctionmust be made, down to a simple, specific, example

complete waste of time. Perhaps an experience once received is de-

Marat dead. Royal Shakespeare Company production, 1965.

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