Theater: Blood Bath

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The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, by Peter Weiss, is a hypodermic needle plunged directly into the playgoer's emotional bloodstream. It hypnotizes the eye and bruises the ear. It shreds the nerves; it vivisects the psyche—and it may scare the living daylights out of more than a few playgoers.

As its endless title too literally explains, it is a play within a play—a dramatization of the dagger slaying of the French revolutionary leader who was killed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. (Actually, the enlightened keeper of the Charenton asylum did believe in the therapeutic value of having inmates act out plays, and Sade, who was incarcerated there for a time, contributed some scripts.)

As soon as the insane stumble and jitter onstage with their dreadfully absent eyes, their bodily tics, their slavering mouths, their heads lolling like half-decapitated flowers, it is clear that the asylum keeper of the evening is Director Peter Brook. Abetted by the superbly disciplined Royal Shakespeare Company, Brook directs with the cool ferocity of a mad scientist, as if he were running a controlled experiment to see how much chilled sweat could be squeezed from the audience's brow. He uses every weapon in the theatrical arsenal to mount a sustained barrage on the senses. A sound track assaults the ear with insinuation ranging from the wail of a solitary violin to the menacing timpani of wooden spoons. Eerie moans and whimpers fill the air like the cries of lost souls, recorded in limbo. A clownishly decked-out Greek chorus of whores and fools breaks into gritty tunes and cynical ditties on the age's corruption that evoke Brecht and Weill.

The fretful interruptions, emendations, and eruptive self-concerns of the asylum's inmates form a play within the play within the play. An asthenic-looking fop, playing an innocent love scene with Charlotte Corday, promptly tries to rape her. In dumb show, a single tipsy file of the insane marches to the guillotine, and their heads drop in deadly percussive succession. Stripped to the waist and kneeling, Sade is lashed by Corday with a spastic whipping motion of her hair that raises imaginative welts of erotic cruelty.