Disgusted audiences walk out of RSC’s Marat/Sade
Dildos, rape, masturbation – this RSC revival may jolt you out of your comfort zone, but it’s terribly dated
JUST when we thought audiences were beyond being shocked, along comes the Royal Shakespeare Company's latest production of Marat/Sade. Peter Weiss's play famously premiered at the RSC in 1964 under the direction of the legendary Peter Brook. Then, the production combining Antonin Artaud's revolutionary Theatre of Cruelty with ideas from Brecht, Marx and Freud, was considered groundbreaking.
Over four decades later, the RSC revival of the French Revolution tale has audiences walking out in disgust. The Guardian reports that an average of 30 people a night have been leaving Anthony Neilson's restaging, with one audience member describing it as "utter filth and depravity".
Britain's worldly theatre critics may not have been shocked, but they were largely unimpressed.
This "drama school exercise" in pushing boundaries offers violent masturbation, a farting bishop, rape, lunacy and coprophilia, says Libby Purves in The Times. The director seems to think that linking this tale of the French Revolution to Abu Ghraib and the Arab Spring makes it relevant. While seeing how principled conflict can sour into sexual sadism is always relevant, adds Purves, sadly "this play is mostly nonsense".
There are enough dildos waggled about to furnish a Soho sex-shop, says Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. But despite some notable performances it's "all too muddled, clever and overlong for its own good". After a while, sighs Cavendish, the uninhibited orgiastic outbreaks, "aren't so much shocking as faintly awful to behold".
For The Financial Times critic Ian Shuttleworth it was just terribly dated. Neither Marat's vision of a violent proletarian revolution nor de Sade's libidinous libertarian anarchy offer credible alternatives to today's repressively tolerant society.
The production may jolt us out of our comfort zone, says Shuttleworth, "but towards the potential of what else, it cannot make a plausible 21st-century proposal".
But the RSC's Jeanie O'Hare defended the production, telling the BBC that there is nothing on stage you couldn't see by flicking TV channels late at night. She added that some people had walked out because "they felt uncomfortable with the play's political message, rather than scenes of sex and violence". ·
