Marat/Sade:

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

The Marquis de Sade, held in the asylum at Charenton, is putting on a play about the death of Marat, using his fellow inmates as actors. This startling conception is the basis of Peter Weiss' drama Marat/Sade, which combines intense personal confrontations with political philosophy.

In the play-within-a-play, the dramatic fate of Jean-Paul Marat is emblematic of the fate of the French Revolution. In the debate between radicals and moderates, there's also a part for the Girondist deputy Duperret and the rabble-rousing ex-priest Jacques Roux.

There is an extended debate between Marat and de Sade — playing himself, as a participant in the Revolution — in which an extreme individualism is pitted against a uncompromising commitment to the cause of the dispossessed. More corporeally, Marat's skin disease forces him to write in a bathtub, while de Sade is whipped while describing his disillusionment with the Revolution.

"At first I saw in the revolution a chance for a tremendous outburst of revenge an orgy greater than all my dreams
[CORDAY slowly raises the whip and lashes him. SADE cowers]
But then I saw
when I sat in the courtroom myself
[Whiplash. SADE gasps]
not as I had been before the accused but as a judge I couldn't bring myself to deliver the prisoner to the hangman
...

It was inhuman it was dull and curiously technocratic
[Whiplash.]
And now Marat
[Whiplash. SADE breathes heavily.]
now I see where the revolution is leading

And in the outer frame, there's a struggle between de Sade, director of the play, and Coulmier, director of the asylum — de Sade has left in some passages that he'd previously agreed to cut, and some of the sentiments of 1790 are inappropriate in the Napoleonic France of 1808. The setting also provides elements of farce to balance the otherwise serious tone: Marat's assassin Charlotte Corday is played by a narcoleptic and his mistress Simonne Evrard by an obsessive-compulsive, while patients interrupt proceedings several times.