Sade/Marat
PACT in association with UNSW Theatre and Film Studies Faculty
Directed by Christopher Ryan
PACT Theatre, Railway Pde, Erskineville, Sydney
Until August 16

Review by Brendan Doyle

Good news! Theatre is not dead! It's alive and kicking in Erskineville, where Sydneysiders can still see (but hurry) this exciting, original piece of theatre played with commitment and energy by a talented ensemble of nine young performers.

I could rave for pages about this show. But I will be brief. Sade/Marat is confronting, obsessive, nightmarish, funny, crude and explosive.

If you've seen Marat/Sade, the film or play version, you get the general idea. Inmates of a mental asylum during the French Revolution perform a play about the assassination of Marat, the 1789 revolutionary.

The PACT version is a montage of texts, from the Peter Weiss play, and from Foucault, de Sade and others. The most exciting stuff, however, comes from the performers themselves, who have used these texts to ask hard questions about our world, and come up with astonishing theatrical answers.

The actors, in their asylum garb, rant, wrestle with each other, pull down their undies, make weird faces, and talk at the audience, sometimes all at once, about revolution, power, sex, cruelty, society. Sometimes they have to shout over the top of relentless music.

Sade/Marat asks, for example, When does the enforcement of moral or political law become indistinguishable from the very behaviour it punishes? Plenty of other questions are asked too, about male violence, apathy, the revolutionary impulse and how it is crushed.

But this piece is also an exploration of theatre itself, its potential, how it works and what it can mean, its political function.

You feel, watching this, that theatre is not separate from life, society and politics. This theatre experience is a vital, living part of challenging and questioning the status quo and therefore of beginning to change the world.

Director Christopher Ryan told me he would like the actors to claim ownership of the show and take it elsewhere. Let's hope they do. Meanwhile, if you can, see it while it's hot! And it's affordable. $15 and $10.

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
For further details regarding subscriptions and
correspondence please contact glw@greenleft.org.au

Tools

• Bookmark This Page
• Print This Page