Performance, one act
Premiere – 25th April, 2024
The scandalous writer and notorious pervert Marquis de Sade spent the last thirteen years of his life in the Charenton psychiatric clinic. The director of the asylum is said to have run his institution according to modern and humane principles, so he allowed Sade to organize dinners, balls and concerts on the asylum premises, as well as stage and perform plays written by the marquis himself. Other patients took part in these eccentric performances as a strange form of art therapy, and soon the theatrical evenings of the asylum became an elitist fashion thing to be experienced by all the cream of Napoleonic era society.
The performance “Marat/Sade” is an attempt to imagine and restore one of these performances staged in the asylum – an ambitious, musical performance about the last hours of revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat – the famous death in the bathtub.
It is wildly sensual and philosophically charged work that solves problems of the need for revolution and whether change should begin in society or in the individual.