ARCHIVES 2000 / Marat - Sade

Charenton Hospital, 1808. The asylum director watches the Marquis de Sade, one of the "patients" of the establishment, direct a play whose theme is a revolutionary drama that he himself has written and in which he has perform the other "patients". Does theatre have a therapeutic effect on those who are labelled "insane" ? The results obtained will be considerable, but very different from those expected by the hospital director. The theatre liberates oppressed or unrecognised force. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat Performed by the Theatre Group of the Charenton Hospice under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, written in 1964 is one of the most important plays of the 1960s. Peter Brook's production in London and Jean Tasso's in Paris, were performed in 1966. The Taganka's version staged in Moscow in 1998 gives a fresh view of the play in the form of a musical tragi-comedy using jazz, rap, cabaret and rock. It is a liberating play directed in way that plays on the frontier-line between people, between the theatre and real life, and between madness and reason. This is Yuri Liubimov's first time at Avignon with his Taganka Theatre that he founded in 1964, and that remains a major reference in Russian theatre