Stitching writer takes on Sade and prompts walk-outs

It may have been an instant cult classic when it was first staged in 1964, but London theatregoers are walking out in disgust during a new production of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, directed by Anthony Nielson – writer of Stitching, which was banned from being performed in Malta when it was first submitted to the Film and Stage Classification Board in 2009.

The Royal Shakespeare Company production – premiered in Stratford-Upon-Avon on 14 October – i a complicated take on the life (and, predominantly, bloody death) of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat.

The premise is based on a quirky historical episode: the audience is privy to the play put up at the Charenton Asylum in 1808, directed by the notorious political thinker and erotic writer Marquis de Sade, which illustrates Marat’s life. Sade aims to contest the idea that art purifies the soul, and the ensuing chaos he orchestrates with the help of his inmate actors puts paid to his theory with shocking gusto.

Nielson’s revival of the production, however, takes things a visceral step further, graphically depicting rape, sodomy with sex toys and the character of de Sade (played by Jasper Britton) being tortured by a Taser gun.

An average of 30 walkouts a night have allegedly been reported, with audience members lambasting the play’s “filth and depravity,” despite the its already notorious history. It appears that a crucial reason for people leaving early was that a rape scene occurs just before the interval, an irate 25-year-old theatregoer said.

“I knew it was supposed to be edgy but it was the worst kind of filth dressed up as quality theatre. They have got it badly wrong. I don’t blame people for walking out. They took it too far this time,” she told the British press.

Critics were also less than impressed by the production, generally finding it too reliant on shock tactics and, curiously, commenting on how it comes across as a rather “dated” example of the ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre school.

“It tries incredibly hard to shock. But watching that litany of violence, you become quite numbed by it,” theatre critic Andrew Dixon said on BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row, while Dominic Cavendish, his colleague over at The Daily Telegraph, said that the play was “brave” but also that it “has all the makings of a RSC flop.”

A Maltese-language version of Marat/Sade was performed locally in December 2003 by Theaterworx at the MITP Theatre in Valletta. Directed by Marcelle Theuma, it elicited no controversy.