Wow – we’d forgotten the power of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade until we caught Soup Can Theatre’s short run of the revolutionary 1963 play. The production closed Sunday (July 24).
It’s revolutionary in several senses: it takes place during the French Revolution, and also attacks the smug powers that overtly and covertly control society.
In addition, Marat/Sade is, surprisingly, an inventive musical, with a Weill-and-Brecht-style score by Richard Peaslee and Adrian Mitchell.
Set in the Charenton Asylum, the play turns the audience into voyeuristic visitors. We watch a show written by the inmate the Marquis de Sade in which he engages in a debate about liberty, politics and sensuality with Jean-Paul Marat, a revolutionary hero whose skin disease forces him to spend the action sitting in a bathtub. The narrative’s climax is his murder by the driven Charlotte Corday.
Director Sarah Thorpe moves the action from early 19th-century France to mid-50s Montreal, turning the asylum into the institute at McGill University where Donald Ewen Cameron conducted experiments with drugs and electroshock on non-consenting patients.
The idea is a suggestive one, but for one episode of ECT, the production made little use of the chosen period.
In fact, the musical numbers were the strongest part of the production. This is a company that knows how to give theatrical resonance to songs, as they showed in their 2010 Fringe show Love Is A Poverty You Can Sell. The actors, along with musical director Pratik Gandhi and his musicians – all playing residents in the institute – gave the ballads, rousing anthems and satiric numbers just the right dramatic edge.
A few of the performers in this young, energetic cast were also memorable. Standouts included Heather Marie Annis as Corday, a narcoleptic melancholic who’s never quite sure what’s happening around her Andrew Fleming as her lover, Duperret, in fact a sexual predator who can’t leave Corday alone Allan Michael Brunet as an articulate Marat, and Glyn Bowerman as the rabble-rousing priest Jacques Roux.
As Coulmier, the director of the institute (and a stand-in for Cameron), Scott Moore brought the proper gravitas to the production, stopping its action and complaining when things went too far and explaining to the audience (as did the sly, narrating Herald, played by Kat Letwin) that society has progressed beyond the events depicted in the play.
Of course it hasn’t.
And as insightful as the production was at times, what it lacked was a touch of scariness. That quality was finally captured in its last few minutes, as anarchy erupted onstage with a violence that seemed to leave even de Sade aghast at its intensity.
Mammalian mentoring
For the past several years, Mammalian Diving Reflex has been working with children, developing shows like Haircuts By Children that have played around the country.
Now artistic director Darren O’Donnell is mentoring the kids to take on a sense of ownership in a broader sense.
In 2005, Mammalian Diving Reflex began to work with an assortment of young people from Parkdale. They’re now 15 and, as O’Donnell notes, ready to learn some “art/culture-making skills,” with the idea that they’ll eventually inherit the company.
The young artists will not only be mentored but will also be creating mainstage work, some of which will be workshopped around town. There’s also a plan for a producing course that includes a residency at the Gladstone. During the next year, 10 kids will learn event production, ultimately running their own office at the Gladstone and presenting a weekend festival of Parkdale-based work by young people.
As if that weren’t enough work for playwright/director O’Donnell, he’s also doing a masters in urban planning, launching a research branch of the company called The Tendency Group and taking eight of the Parkdale company to Nova Scotia in August to do a performance called Nightwalks With Teenagers with kids there.
Wall fall down
We’ve admired the work of playwright and director Jordan Tannahill for several years, especially his 2010 SummerWorks show Post Eden. He’s the recipient of this year’s Ken McDougall Award for emerging director.
Tannahill’s concluding the residency that his company, Suburban Beast, has had at Buddies in Bad Times with a workshop presentation of Peter Fechter: 52 Minutes.
The piece chronicles the last 52 minutes in the life of Fechter, a gay East Berlin teen shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962. Hundreds of onlookers watched his death, and the staging places the audience on either side of the action, reflecting the way the onlookers to the tragedy were positioned on both sides of the wall.
Thomas Olajide plays Fechter, with direction by Christian Barry and a wraparound sound design by Richard Feren.
The pwyc workshop, following by a talkback, is at Buddies, August 7 at 2 pm. 416-975-8555.
stage@nowtoronto.com
