Writing a Revolution: The characterization of Marat and Sade?

Marat was the greatest martyr of the Revolutionary left. For a year, he was worshipped as a saint. Today, he is usually remembered with a feeling of revulsion and horror. But this superficial reading does little for the complex character of the man once worshipped as "The Friend of the People." A strange and driven man, who began life obsessed with human healing and ended his life obsessed with gathering 500,000 heads, a man who had once worked as an expensive doctor for the priveleged and then devoted his life to a people he called "too gentle." This Marat of strange paradoxes is the one far too often dismissed as merely a blood-ravening madman in history books (Adolphus, 232).

Jean-Paul Marat was not the most pleasant person one could hope to meet. Even his extreme stench resulting from scrofula that he had contracted in the sewers aside, his paranoia did not render him a very popular man which is possibly the reason why, despite his influence, he had no personal following as did Robespierre , Danton and even Hebert. Marat was a obsessive workaholic. He said that he had no time to sleep and that twenty-four hours a day he was on guard for the people's welfare. He was violent, when not verbally so than he appeared it and he usually carried pistols. He called the Parisian mob "gentle" and was continually asking them why they did not take measures against the aristocracy (Adolphus, 232). Marat, somewhat like Robespierre, believed that when he failed to achieve something it was inevitably due to a conspiracy of men determined to undermine the virtuous. He, like Robespierre, suffered from a martyr complex (although, unlike Robespierre, he actually got to be one. It was said that Robespierre was jealous of the manner in which Marat died) He was, let's face it, one taco short of the full enchilada. Nevertheless, he was not a man that his colleagues could easily ignore for not even Danton or Robespierre aroused the love and respect of the people as did the rather mentally disturbed editor of the Ami du Peuple. He also compelled admiration from various subsequent thinkers, among them Peter Weiss (Adolphus, 232).

The first Marat/Sade had a direct bearing on the RSC's classical work, certainly in defining the character of the company and its approach to the emotional lives of Shakespeare's characters; Jackson's Ophelia in the following year, opposite David Warner, was the first modern, sexually distraught reading of the role, and set the standard, and the way of acting the part, for all our Ophelias since (Adolphus, 232).

Brook had insisted that the actors immerse themselves in madness as it was before 1808 - before drugs and before treatment, and when a different social attitude towards the insane made them behave differently: "For this," he said, "the actor had no outside model - he looked at faces in Goya not as models to imitate but as prods to encourage his confidence ...