Professor David Peimer
Showing the French Revolution in Theatre: Danton’s Death by Buchner and Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss
Professor David Peimer - French Revolution in Theatre: Danton’s Death and Marat/Sade
- Okay, so today we go dive into looking at a question, which I think is a fascinating one, is how does theatre, art, literature, novels, fiction, basically- How does fiction, in this case theatre, show history? We think about the French Revolution over, you know, 240 years ago or so. So going back so long, we can only imagine what it was like. Obviously, we can get the historical facts, but as we are not creating a documentary, even that would have editing choices and structured along a storyline. But in order to create a work of fiction in theatre, how does that show what we can only imagine happened 240 years ago or something coming out of it so long ago? And it fascinates me how the contemporary imagination can flip back, you know, nearly two and a half centuries to try and imagine something and then create it for the stage, costumes and other things. And so obviously taking something as absolutely huge as the French Revolution itself and trying to imagine how to begin to look at that in theatre. What themes does one choose? What characters, what setting, what costumes and so on? What kind of aspect of the overall story, etc? Because if it works and it gets audiences, then it will resonate with audiences today, which is really the important thing. So from our eyes today, how do we look back and imagine and create a piece of theatre, which is about something nearly two and a half centuries ago? If we think back to the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Berlin Wall over 30 years ago- If we think back to it, how would we create a film or a piece of theatre which reflected something of that moment? And if we were living in another 200 years time and then look back 230 years to the fall of the Berlin Wall, well, how would we show that in whatever form?
Maybe theatre it might be, whatever kind of AI or digital universe we inhabit. Who knows? But how would that be shown? Even just looking back at the end of Apartheid in ‘94, going back again about, what, 30 years or 28 years or so, how do we show that? How would that be shown in 220 years, etc, etc? So as we look back, it’s how does theatre, you know, run with the idea that it can and should imagine the past and show it, but knowing always it’s in fictional form? It’s not a documentary, and it’s not trying to simply adhere to the facts, although it’s inspired by the facts. So I’d like to look at that question. And the second question is these plays, what strikes me and other scholars is that they try to put history itself on stage. How do we actually put history through the fictional eyes and the imaginative eyes of theatre on stage itself? An extraordinary leap of the human imagination to be able to do it. But history itself and the processes of history are examined in these plays. And of course, revolution because these two plays we’re going to look at are based on obviously looking into the French Revolution and how that was shown. Okay, so on the top left we see “Danton’s Death,” which is a contemporary film and theatre version of a remarkable play written by Georg Buchner. And I’ll come to him in a moment. He lived about 30, 40 years after the French Revolution. So it was, on the one hand, inspired by the revolution and the ideals, liberty, quality, fraternity, the Enlightenment, the triumph of reason over superstition and fanatical religious belief, the triumph of human rights, separation of powers, state, judiciary, etc, and, you know, all the beginnings of, I guess, modernity and modern society as we know it.
So his play was called “Danton’s Death,” and it’s around the death of Danton, one of the great leaders of the French Revolution, Danton, Robespierre and Marat and others, but the primary ones. Then the picture in the middle and the picture on the right of the screen is from another remarkable play by a half-Jewish playwright who was German. And his family got out of Berlin in 1938. And after going first to the old Czechoslovakia, then they managed to get to Sweden. Anyway, 1938, they managed to get to Sweden, and that’s where he lived, and they got out just in time. And he then wrote this remarkable play called “The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat,” one of the three great leaders of the French Revolution, as I mentioned, Danton, Robespierre, and Marat. And that in the middle is an image from his play, from Peter Weiss’s play written in the '60s, directed by the great, brilliant British director, Peter Brook. And a film was made of it, which I’m going to show some clips. And then on the right is also a clip from it of Marat. Marat, as I’m sure many people know, had a terrible skin disease. So he was constantly in a bath of tepid water to try and ease the itch from his skin disease. And the first one is Buchner’s that we’re going to look at of “Danton’s Death.” If we could go to the next slide, please? So Buchner is up there on the top left, Georg Buchner. He lives those dates, 1813 to 1837. So he dies of typhus at the age of 24.
A remarkable genius, and I use that word very, very thoughtfully. A remarkable writer, and many people agree that he would’ve gone on to be close, let’s say at least, to Goethe, Shakespeare, and others. He only managed to write a couple of plays in the short life. He was dead by age of 24, but they are utterly influential. They are so regarded, not only in Germany, but in Europe and the world, and staged all the time in various translations and adaptations, and films are made of his works. You know, William Kentridge did a fantastic one based on “Woyzeck,” which was adapted from Buchner’s original play of “Woyzeck,” the ordinary guy. And I’m going to come to him a bit in his life. And we’re going to look at “Danton’s Death,” which was his great play, if you like, the great historical political play. And it’s regarded as the great play about that momentous event, the French Revolution. And then Peter Weiss on the bottom left. 1916, he’s the one I mentioned, half-Hungarian, Jewish father and Christian German mother, but managed to get out in 1938, escape from Berlin via Czechoslovakia, even bit of Switzerland, etc. Manages to get to Sweden, and that’s where he lives the rest of his life. And he wrote many things. He was a journalist as well. But the primary piece we’re going to look at today is his play, “Marat/Sade,” the one that I mentioned. Okay? And I think what is truly fascinating about these guys is that they’re taking on the same topic, which is the French Revolution, but the one is looking at it 35, 40 years after the event itself, which is inspired by the ideals but also disillusioned by the sheer amount of bloodletting, the violence, the corruption of those ideals. And it’s gone into a military dictatorship, Napoleon, and many, many other things.
So he’s looking, but he’s very close to it. So it’s a very visceral written play. It’s not as philosophical and thoughtful and looking back. It’s very direct almost because he feels it so closely. One can imagine living, you know, 30, 40 years after the French Revolution in Europe still ruled by kings and princes and princesses and all the rest of it everywhere, feudal system. But France is the one that’s gone through the revolution. So it’s fascinating for me to look at what he does with that event in history. And then Peter Weiss much, much later, over two centuries later after the event, writing about it in a much more thoughtful, philosophical, and theatrical way, which obviously, you know, he’s trying to lean something for our times. Buchner has a remarkable number of phrases, aphorisms, mixtures of poetry and naturalistic writing. It’s like it’s feverish, his writing. And he has this wonderful phrase. “Is the individual mere foam on the wave of history or not?” And isn’t it one of the great debates? You know, are there waves and patterns of history that come and go, that repeat themselves in different forms, waves of history that rush up on the shore and then flood back and then again and keep moving of nationalism, of religious fanaticism, of extremes of poverty, of massive economic crashes and so on? And how these change and warfares, so the waves of history keep coming. No wave is the same, of course, but it can repeat patterns, which we can discern. Is the individual mere foam, or is the individual really in charge?
Do individuals really create and make and direct it and lead it and get millions or hundreds of thousands to follow them like the Pied Piper, whatever? It’s a fantastic, endless debate, which Buchner tries to grapple with. Is history determined by individuals or by patterns of economic social forces, political changes, technological advancements, all of those things, or both? You know, and that the individuals, as Euripides would say, rides the horse of their destiny, which might be the destiny of history as well. Okay, so Buchner, just to go into his life a bit, he is really- I cannot stress enough how huge he is globally and not only in Germany. Dies so young. And he was already seen after his death in the early days and certainly now as linked to Shakespeare, utterly influenced by Shakespeare in his writing and Schiller and Goethe and so many of the other great writers. At the age of 18, in 1831, he went to study medicine in Strasbourg. And in Strasbourg, he immersed himself in French literature, political thought, while he’s also studying medicine. 1834, he publishes a revolutionary pamphlet critical of social injustice in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in today’s Germany. The authorities arrest him and his friends. He manages to get out and flees across the border. All the while, he’s finishing his PhD in cranial nerves and medicine. He manages to get to the University of Zurich, and he’s a lecturer in anatomy, and that’s where he spends his last months writing plays, teaching medicine and then dies from typhus at the age of 24. What he has accomplished in those years, those short years of life, is quite incredible. And it’s this play, “Danton,” about the French Revolution, that is, in a sense, the beginnings of modern prose, of modern European prose.
The writing is so quick and sharp. There’s no long, endless speeches, no long, endless descriptions. Cut to the chase, move on. He’s almost prefiguring film writing and the influence of film. The scenes are cut and paste, quick, quick, sharp-moving scenes, one, and then the next, and then the next and the next. So contemporary in the approach of short attention span from the audience almost. And he combines poetry with some Shakespeare, with some allusions from anywhere, the Bible, just takes it, together with a kind of naturalist writing of Germany of the time or German at the times. The most important prize that one can win as a writer in Germany is the Buchner Prize for Literature. Win that, and you’re at the top of the tree in Germany as a writer, and it’s awarded annually and was created in 1923. So his play- And I’ll come onto Peter Weiss when we look at his play. So his play “Danton’s Death” is about, as I said, the revolutionary of Danton. Danton is portrayed as loving life, having passion, wine and woman and song. He’s a lawyer. He’s a leader of the revolution. He’s so popular amongst the army and popular amongst the emerging middle class, mercantile class. He’s popular amongst the peasants, the ordinary people. And he’s a larger-than-life, you know, human figure with humour and wit and human folly and foibles, etc. He is the one who institutes the Reign of Terror to have the guillotine and start guillotining aristocrats and many others and so on. Then he freaks out and thinks, “Oh God, this is going way too far. It’s way too much, got to stop it. This is hell, this is madness. This was not part of the original intention.”
And he tries, but by this stage, Robespierre has set up the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre is already running the show. Robespierre has a cold, icy heart, very little empathy, very little feeling, very little humanity. Today, we might call him a technocrat kind of leader, efficient, , efficient par excellence, but absolutely- And obsessed with perfection and ideals and everything neat and in order, the opposite of a semi-chaotic Danton. So this is how Buchner chooses to portray the two of them in the play. And they are the two main characters, two main leaders of the revolution. Robespierre eventually, because he’s so threatened by Danton’s popularity, has Danton called up and found guilty of treason for all sorts of trumped-up charges and sentenced to death on the guillotine. And we’re going to show some scenes from the play. And it’s all about, you know, the last few weeks, if you like, of Danton’s life and the conflict between him and Robespierre and that debate. Can you stop the revolution once it started? Once it is so full of blood, can you step back? Can’t you? Can you influence history? Can one not when revolutions start to become more bloody than intended or far more full of horror, terror, and death? And what is the- And the word terror starts to come into popular language around this time, of course, the Reign of Terror.
Started under Danton, tries to stop it, but Robespierre won’t have any of it and just wants to carry on because he wants to get rid of Danton, his main opposition. We know so many references today to this kind of dynamic, but Buchner is the first to really grasp it in terms of writing about history and leaders. Some of his great phrases. Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway digs his own grave. “Have a revolution, don’t go the whole way, you’ll dig your own grave,” Robespierre says. Beautiful phrases, like, “The stars prick the night sky. There must be great pain in the eye from which the teardrops fall, those stars in the sky.” You know, Danton and other phrases. So the humanity compared to the technocratic bureaucracy. “Revolution is like satin. It devours its children.” The revolution will always devour its children. And it’s become such a phrase globally, how the revolution will devour and eat up its own. “The breath of an aristocrat living is the death rattle of freedom.” “The strides of humanity are slow. They can only be counted in centuries.” These are just some phrases to give you a taste of the philosophical, poetic, ordinary writing of this guy in the play. “We are puppets. Our strings are being pulled by unknown forces of history. Or are they?” “If we go to heaven, they’ll put us to work on the thunder, Captain.” So these are some of the kinds of writing that he does. The other great debate that happens is this debate between what is vice and what is virtue under the Reign of Terror.
And it was Disraeli who said, you know, “For some people what is vice may be virtue for others.” And these debates are going around in these times that Buchner is writing and the times of the French Revolution 'cause he’s taken quite a bit from transcripts and that the vice of terror must have the moral certitude of virtue. And Robespierre had the great phrase, “Virtue must rule. Virtue must rule through terror.” Isn’t that the case in so many revolutions, that when there’s terror there’s almost a need by the murderous leaders to have some sense of virtue attached so it’s not just pure terror, you know? It’s for the good of the nation, the good of the people, or these are the impure, these are the parasites. These are the enemies of the state, etc, etc. The vermin must be wiped out, killed. And in the end there’s a sense of a terrible fatalism of history that Buchner is imbued with. From being idealistic, you know, in his late teens, 1819, starting to go to university, by the time he writes this in his very early 20s, 21, 22, there’s the terrible ecstatic truth of fatalism in history, in my opinion, in Buchner. So he sees that Robespierre’s virtue enables him to feel superior to the others. Robespierre calls it virtue, and terror must rule always through virtue and have virtue justified for whatever moral, political, or religious or ideological reason. Then you can get away with it.
And that’s the huge difference with Danton, who says, “No, terror is terror. You know, it’s gone so far.” Does every event that transforms history only advance and happen through bloodletting? All these questions are raised in the play. Okay, so if we can show a slide, these are a couple of clips taken from one or two films 'cause there are a lot of them made of Buchner’s play. So, Emily, if we could please start with Slide 3. This is the trial of Danton by Robespierre. Okay, thanks, Emily. If we can hold it there- So that scene is a scene taken from “The Great Trial of Danton.” Some of these phrases are taken from, as I said, the actual transcript of the original trials and meetings of the committees in France at the time. Okay, and what it presents us with is the character of Danton, who almost starts to get sober after the bloodletting and the rush and the feverish of revolution and the ideals and being caught up in it. “What have we done? What kind of people are we? Where are we going? Stop it, we have to stop this madness. It’s blood after blood.” You know, to quote Macbeth, “Blood,” they said. “We’ll have blood.” You know, “Once I’m steeped so far in blood, there’s no going back,” to paraphrase Macbeth. More and more becomes essential. It’s never enough. More and more suspicion of who’s a spy and who isn’t. Who’s a collaborator and who isn’t? Should I kill this one, shouldn’t I? Just keep my own power, but also, you know, how suspicion, collaboration, infiltration, spying all start to kind of take a paranoid presence in a society and what to do. Is it avoidable, is it unavoidable in the nature of times of great change, of revolutionary change in a society? If we can look at the next slide, please. This is a clip from a different production, but it just shows a little bit of Robespierre talking about virtue and terror. Virtue is the weapon of terror. Different production, but same play.
CLIP BEGINS
The Committee of Public Safety have just ordered my arrest. I’ve been offered a place to hide.
They’re now going to arrest Robespierre.
We couldn’t leave the enemy at our back. It would’ve been madness! I helped save the country.
The weapon of the republic is terror.
How much longer must we behave like newborn children covered in blood and rage with coffins for cradles, playing ball with human heads?
And the strength of the republic is virtue.
You have laid your hands upon my life! And now it will rise up and meet you face to face. I will bury you under the weight of my accomplishments!
Virtue, because without virtue, terror is destructive. Terror because without terror virtue is powerless.
CLIP ENDS
- So if we can hold it there- So what’s fascinating- Just wanted to show this little clip 'cause it’s so important that any revolution requires some ideological justification or religious or political or some great moral precept. You know, we’re doing it for the nation, for the purity of the nation. We’re doing it for the good of the cause. We are doing it to get rid of the enemies of the state. You know, we always have to- There always has to be some moral or religious or political, whatever, a justification. And in those days the word was virtue. There needs to be some virtue attached. Otherwise, it is even by the killers it is seen as pure slaughter. But if they have something to believe in, however fabricated or manufactured that is, then it can be justified, and it can be set up as a belief. And we can all go ahead and guillotine, you know, as many as we want. And Buchner is aware of it. He identifies it from the actual French Revolution 'cause these are words coming from some of the main individuals who lived and spoke at the time. And he identifies the necessity of that for any great revolutionary movement or any great political change movement, if you like. And it’s part of his brilliance. The age of 21, 22, he understands human nature needs it. Human communities need that. And so virtues, as he says, is the weapon of terror. And of course terror is necessary for the revolution to succeed. Danton, “Stop it, it’s enough. Terror, it’s not virtue. It’s just slaughter, murder, etc.” And that becomes the great debate between the two of them. Okay, we can show the next clip is from one of the Robespierre allies, Saint-Just, with his cold- A different production, the same play. Cold, bureaucratic understanding of the necessity to unleash blood.
CLIP BEGINS
- I have noticed that some in this assembly have remarkably sensitive hearing. They quail at the mention of the word blood. I feel that a few general observations are called for to convince them that we are no more cruel in the way we go about things than nature herself or indeed time. Nature follows her own laws quietly and inexorably. Man is destroyed whenever he comes into conflict with them. A slight change in atmospheric conditions, a subterranean blaze, a sudden shift in the geological strata or in the balance of a mass of water and a plague, a volcano, an earthquake or a flood bury thousands. And the consequence? An insignificant and barely perceptible alteration of physical nature, which would’ve left hardly a trace were it not for the corpses in its wake. I ask you, shall the moral universe be more considerate in her revolutions than the physical universe? May not an idea size down all opposition, as does a law of physics? Above all, shall an experience which shatters and removes the entire structure of man’s moral universe cower at the sight of blood? The forces of history operate through us, just as the forces of nature operate through floods and through fire. What matter whether a man dies during an earthquake or during the revolution? The steps of human progress are slow. One can count them only by centuries. Behind each step, rise up the graves of entire generations. To arrive at the simplest discovery, the most elementary truth, has cost the lives of millions who have died on the way. Surely then, it is understandable today when the pace of history has accelerated so rapidly that many more men should lose their breath.
We know this. Since all men were created under the same circumstances, all men are therefore equal, apart from those differences which nature herself has imposed. Everyone then is entitled to the same advantages. But special privileges must belong to no man, nor to any class. Every application of this statement of principle when translated into reality has cost human life. The storming of the Bastille, the execution of the king, the purging of the moderates are its punctuation marks. It has required only four years to turn this idea into fact. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve taken centuries and been punctuated by generations. Is it so astounding that the talent of the revolution should disgorge its corpses at every bend and turn? Our work is far from done. We have yet to conclude our proposition. Shall a thousand or so extra corpses hinder us from doing so? Moses led his people through the Red Sea and on into the desert until the old cut-up generation withered away. Then and only then, he founded his new order. Citizens, we have neither the Red Sea nor the desert, but we have war, and we do have the guillotine. The revolution is like the daughters of Pelias. She dismembers mankind to give it a new birth. Humanity will rise again from this maelstrom of blood like the Earth from the waters of the Great Flood. We call upon tyrannicides of the future who across Europe bear under their cloaks the dagger of Brutus. May we summon all the secret enemies of tyranny throughout the entire Earth to share with us this sublime hour!
CLIP ENDS
Okay, thanks, Emily. If you can hold it there-
I notice that some in this-
Extraordinary power of theatre. This speech is written by Buchner when he’s 22 years old, 23, in the same play, different production. This character’s allied with Robespierre against Danton, wants more and more bloodletting, obviously. And it’s justified by the virtue, in inverted commas, or the ideologies of, “What difference is it to nature?” Nature requires blood. Nature requires nature’s earthquakes, etc, compared to what is necessary to change, purge, cleanse, human society of what has gone there, the evils of the past for the purity of the future. The ancient regeneration archetypal myth, the birth, the death of the one for the birth and regeneration of a new society. Classic archetypal myth used for many revolutions. What is meant by the word virtue in this case? What is it really about? How much more slaughter, more and more death and blood to come? It’s extraordinary to me that such a young writer can write, can understand, give us a perception 40 years after the French Revolution. He gives us the perception of some of the key ideas, which I think speak to us so powerfully today, certainly over the last century, into our century and times today.
He gets the core ideas of history and revolution and how history moves and individuals try not to be the foam but try to be the wave riding the wave of history to influence and direct it and others try to stop it. What happens? So it’s nature in a sense and the inexorable indifference of nature versus human moral, human conscience, compassion, whatever that we see in this, to me, brilliant speech of this theme, which still speaks so powerfully today. Okay, then the last thing I want to show from Buchner is the scene where the Committee of Public Safety and the convention turn upon Robespierre. So I think it was about six or eight months after he had Danton guillotined that they turned on him and Robespierre himself was taken off to the guillotine and executed himself. The revolution devours its children, as Buchner would say. Okay, if we can show the next scene please, you’ll see how they turn on Robespierre.
- please? Okay, thank you. So what we see is in the play, you know, towards the end of it the convention, the committee turned- Public safety, ironically, turns on Robespierre himself, the cold, calculating, clinical Robespierre. They turn on him because of how much further he’s taken the Reign of Terror but also because he’s starting to kill not only Danton, but once he can get rid of Danton, he can get rid of next, next, next, next, whoever else he wants really. 'Cause Danton is the great charismatic leader together with Robespierre and Marat. And of course, he can get rid of Danton, can get rid of anybody. So I think Buchner is trying to show the individuals and how they’re not just foam but they are part of pattern of history. But in history, out of history, the messy and sort of hungry, voracious appetite of the mob, not only the mob in the streets, but the mob inside the convention also. So it’s this sense of, you know, there’s almost an inexorable mob psychology or hysteria maybe even that takes over in times of great revolution and great change. And I think he tries to capture this also in the play. He’s taking on a hell of a lot. But when it’s staged really well with good translation, of course, it’s remarkable and the power and the effect. And having seen quite a lot- And I’ve directed it as well, but having seen a lot of productions, it never fails to speak to such a contemporary audience of our times in many parts of the world. So I think a remarkable achievement for such a young writer who’s writing only 35, 40 years after the revolution itself. He’s so viscerally inside it but also able to take, tease out some of the key ideas which I’ve tried to mention, which I think are almost repetitive in many revolutions, before and after.
Okay, then I’m going to go on to the Peter Weiss play, “Marat/Sade The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat,” as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. So this is written in the '60s, in the mid-late '60s and staged in Germany and then in England through the RSC and Peter Brook’s fantastic production and his film. One interesting thing about Peter Weiss, 'cause he was obviously half-Jewish with his father being Hungarian-Jewish, is that he also wrote a very important play called “The Investigation,” which was based on the documentary evidence from the Auschwitz Frankfurt trials. And it’s a very powerful semi-documentary adaptation of those papers from the Auschwitz Frankfurt trial, which he’s put into theatre form, if you like. It’s called “The Investigation.” Okay, and he’s written other things as well. So this play is fundamentally about the relationship between the Marquis de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat is the third that I mentioned of the triumvirate of leaders. And Marat is as imbued with the ideals of revolution. No matter how much blood you have to do, doesn’t matter. You have to do it. You have to kill in order to achieve the end result. Get rid of the ancien regime and the aristocrats privilege, etc, and institute liberty, equality, fraternity, and so on. Marat, in a way, is an extension, but a more emotional one of Robespierre. And the play is made as if the Marquis de Sade- And we all know of course sadism and Marquis de Sade and his work coming from there. As if he has become an inmate, a leader of the inmates in the asylum.
And the performers are all, in inverted commas, the lunatics of the asylum and obviously would’ve been called lunatics at the time. So the costumes and the set and so on tries to capture a lot of the period of French Revolution. And it’s as if this Marquis de Sade has written this play about Charlotte Corday coming to kill Jean-Paul Marat, which she did, based on historical fact. But then what Peter Weiss does is he takes the idea, which is not that far from Buchner because he’s influenced by Buchner. Well, what is nature? Are we closer to nature without conscience where nature, earthquakes, volcanoes, birth, death, life is irrelevant, is indifferent? Thousands, millions and millions can die, nature carries on. Or is there something such as a moral or a conscience involved? And what is life without conscience? What is it with? And de Sade takes the point of view in this debate almost that human nature is like more akin to nature, whereas Marat, “No, we can change. We can have things better. We can improve, but we might have to have mass slaughter and enormous bloodletting in order to purge and, you know, get to the promised land of freedom.” So the Marat character is a combination of a Robespierre with needing that virtue, needing we will get to the promised land, but we’re going to have to slaughter, and de Sade. “Well, of course, because human nature is about that. Human nature isn’t about conscience, morals, etc.” So it’s that debate set up between the two main characters in the play and it’s performed by the lunatic inmates of the asylum, more or less of the time of the French Revolution.
And I want to start with the first clip is the whipping of de Sade. So it’s a play, and it’s as if the French elite of Paris have come to watch it. He’s written it, he’s staging it inside the asylum, and we’re all liberal now. We’re all fine. We can come and watch lunatics in the asylum, that we won’t call them lunatics. We’ll call them inmates, and we can watch them perform theatre. And we can sit and applaud and be nice and go have our tea afterwards and goodbye. They’ll stay in the asylum, of course locked up and in chains. They can even have theatre inside the asylum. We are liberal, and we are modern and civilised. And de Sade is throwing this whole thing upside down inside the play. So it’s plays within plays as well, okay? Thanks. If we can show number seven, please.
CLIP BEGINS
Monsieur de Sade is whipped. Monsieur de Sade is whipped.
Marat. Today, they need you because you are going to suffer for them. They need you, and they honour the urn that holds your ashes. But tomorrow they will come back, and they will smash that urn, and they will say, “Marat, who was Marat? Marat, now I will tell you about this revolution which I have to make. When I lay in the Bastille, my ideas were already formed. In prison, I created in my mind monstrous representatives of a dying class. My imaginary giants committed desecrations and tortures. I committed them myself and, like them, allowed myself to be bound and beaten. And even now, I would like to take this beauty here, who stands there so expectantly, and let her beat me while I talk to you about the revolution. At first, I saw in the revolution a chance for a tremendous outburst of revenge, an orgy greater than all my dreams. But then I saw when I sat in the courtroom myself, not as I had been before a prisoner, but as a judge- I saw that I could not bring myself to give the victim to the hangman. I did everything I could to release more, to let them escape. I saw that I was not capable of murder, though murder had been the sole proof of my existence.
And now the very thought of it horrifies me. In September, when I watched the official sacking of the Carmelite convent, I had to bend over in the courtyard and vomit as I watched my processes coming through and women running by holding in their dripping hands the severe genitals of men. And as the months went by and the tumblers rode regularly to the scaffold and the blade dropped and was winched up and dropped again, all the meaning drained out of this revenge. It was unhuman. It was dire and curiously technocratic. And now, Marat- Now, I see where your revolution is leading, to the withering of the individual man, to the death of choice, to uniformity, to deadly weakness in a state which has no contact with the individual but which is impregnable. And so I turn away. I am one of those who has to be defeated, but out of my defeat, I want to seize everything I can get with my own strength. I step out of my place, and I watch what happens without joining in, observing, noting down my observations. And all around me, stillness. And when I pass-
CLIP ENDS
you can hold it there.
[Sade] I want all-
So this is the stage the audience is in the black where we are, and you watch the whole play through the bars 'cause these are the inmates of the asylum performing de Sade’s play about the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday, obviously about the French Revolution. Okay, if we can go to the last clip, please, Emily, number nine. And this is the great debate from the play between Marat, who is arguing similar to Robespierre. There’s virtue, there’s ideas. It’s all worth it in the end so that we can have a cleansed purges, you know, arriving in the promised land, the Moses image compared to de Sade, who is, you know, "It’s about murder, slaughter, the terrible ecstasy of blood and passion and the unleashing of it, more than about the ideals of a revolution.” And this is the conversation between Marat and Sade.
CLIP BEGINS
[Narrator] Conversation concerning life and death.
I read in your books, de Sade, in one of your immortal works, that the animating force of nature is destruction and that our only instrument for measuring life is death.
Correct, Marat, but man has given a false importance to death. Every animal, plant, or man that dies adds to nature’s compost heap, becomes the manure without which nothing could grow, nothing could be created. Death is simply part of the process. Every death, even the cruellest death, drowns in the total indifference of nature. Nature would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race. I hate nature. This passion, this spectator, this unbreakable iceberg face that can bear everything, this goads us to greater and greater acts. But though I hate this goddess, I see that the greatest acts in history have followed her laws. Nature teaches a man to fight for his own happiness. And if he must kill to gain that happiness, by then the murder is natural. Haven’t we always crushed down those weaker than ourselves? Haven’t we torn at the throats of the powerful with continuous villainy and lust? Haven’t we experimented in our laboratories before applying the final solution?
Man is a destroyer, but if he kills and takes no pleasure in it, he’s a machine. He should destroy with passion, like a man. Let me remind you of the execution of Damiens after his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Louis XV. Remember how Damiens died, how gentle the guillotine is compared with his torture? It lasted four hours while the crowd goggled and Casanova at another window felt under the skirts of the ladies watching. His chest, arms, thighs, and calves were slit open. Molten lead they poured into each slit. Boiling oil, they poured over him, burning wax, sulphur. They burnt off his hands. They tied ropes to his arms and to his legs and harnessed him to four horses and geed them up. They pulled at him for an hour, but they’d never done it before, and he wouldn’t come apart until they sawed through his shoulders and his hips. So he lost the first arm and then the second arm, and he watched what they did to him. And then he turned to us, and he shouted out so that everyone could understand. And when he lost the first leg and then the second leg, he still lived.
And in the end, he hung there, a bloody torso with a nodding head just groaning and staring at the crucifix, which the father confessor held up to him. That was a festival with which today’s festivals can’t compete. Even our inquisition has no meaning nowadays. Now, it is all official. We condemn to death without emotion. And there’s no singular personal death to be had, only an anonymous cheapened death that we could dole out to entire nations on a mathematical basis until the time comes for all life to be extinguished.
Citizen Marquis, you may sit as a judge on our tribunals. You may have fought with us last September when we dragged out of the jails the aristocrats who were plotting against us. But you still talk like a grand seigneur. And what you call the indifference of nature is your own lack of compassion.
Compassion, Marat, is the property of the privileged classes. When the giver bends to the beggar, he throbs with contempt. To protect his riches, he pretends to be moved. And his gift to the beggar is no more than a kick. No, no, Marat, no small emotions, please. Your feelings were never petted. For you, just as for me, only the most extreme actions matter.
If I am extreme, I am not extreme in the same way as you. Against nature’s silence, I use action. In the vast indifference, I invent a meaning. I don’t watch unmoved. I intervene, and I say that this and this are wrong. And I work to alter them and to improve them because the- The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair, to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.
CLIP ENDS
- Thanks, we can hold it there, please, Emily. That’s become one of the great phrases come down over the century of theatre, to lift yourself up to turn yourself around and see the world with fresh eyes. So it’s this debate between indifference of nature and that is the way that history operates, or that there’s always an attempt to improve, to make things better. But it may involve a slaughter, a killing, people dying before whatever the promised land is going to be achieved and the new society born with better morals and ideas inside. This comes from- It’s all inside Buchner, and what Peter Weiss is doing is taking it out but making it so contemporary. Obviously, it’s post-Second World War. There’s allusions to the technocratic machine of the mass slaughter of the Holocaust and other things as well. So what I’m trying to do, ultimately, just to put it together very quickly, if I may, is just to say when we look back on this event of 240 years ago how can theatre and film and whatever else through our imagination today, try and imagine what was it like? What resonates for us today? Is it this argument or that? Which interpretation do we prefer or choose? And tease out some of the main ideas, which seem to repeat in human evolution and our own, you know, human nature in societies. And I think that’s for me one of the most fascinating things when we put history itself as the main theme in a play and incorporating one of the great momentous events, the French Revolution, of course. Okay, so I’m going to hold it there, and thank you. And, sorry, I’ve gone over slightly. And sure, we can take some questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Marion found “Danton’s Death,” “Danton’s Tod,” in German. Yeah, it’s brilliant. And for me, one of the best translations into English are by the British, the fantastic British playwright, Howard Brenton, a fantastic translation of Buchner, the collection of his plays.
Q: Dennis, was that Klaus Maria Brandauer in the first clip?
A: Ah, great question. I’ll check that, Dennis. Thank you.
Rita, “Danton” dubbed in English. Ah, thank you for that. Okay, Rita, you’re correct. Great, thanks.
And Rose, if one speaks French, the words are so poignant. Yeah, my French is terrible. I wouldn’t try. I’m very minimal.
So, you know, I thought about it quite a lot, and I thought better to show the versions in French because as you say, Rose, it somehow brings us viscerally closer to Buchner even though we’re two and a half centuries away, closer to the actual era of when it happened. It’s a feeling, and the feeling in the actors is somehow looser and also more physical, more visceral.
Again, thank you very much, everybody. And hope you have a great rest of the weekend as we move on with “Viva La France.” Okay, cheers.