RSC Marat/Sade

Here’s a BBC article about Royal Shakespeare Company production which a friend of mine posted on the facebook this morning:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15428711

I’d really love to see this production. If you’re not familiar with Marat/Sade, it’s a show with bunch of insane asylum inmates being led by the Marquis de Sade in a production of a play he wrote about an assassination. It has some songs, but it’s not a musical. As written, the play has the potential to be really dark and violent and disturbing.

I’ve seen 2 other productions of the play: what I recall about the first was that it was dark but kind of scattered; the second felt distant—it literally was, as it was on a regular proscenium stage with the audience at a nice, polite distance. It seems to me the show would have to be less effective with that setup.

Anyway, this RSC production sound like it might actually be gritty and disturbing. Any show that regularly has audience members walking out is something I’d be interested in seeing. Or doing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a production that I would describe as gritty and disturbing. I've seen things other people may've described that way, but I suppose I have different standards.

I did see a production of Man of La Mancha which was kinda gritty, but it wasn’t really disturbing. It’s Man of La Mancha—too hopeful and positive. I was involved with a production of Bent, which was disturbing, but not gritty. I saw a really awesome production of West Side Story which did not (unlike the other WSS productions I’ve seen) seem to be about a bunch of gay boys prancing around stage; it was violent and actually made sense, but neither gritty nor disturbing. There’s a 1994 London cast recording of The Threepenny Opera that sounds awesomely gritty, the opposite of a university music department production I saw, which was more like and operetta.

This new RSC Marat/Sade apparently has “sexually explicit” material and torture. Bravo. Now, I’m not turned on by the idea of violence. But, (and this is much like my recent critique of Hair) if you’re going to explore something, then fucking explore it, don’t shy away from it, or politely tip your hat toward it. If you’re gonna do, say, Cabaret, you can’t be afraid of exploring presentational sexuality—sexy girls skimpily clad. If you’re gonna do Equus, you can’t be afraid of nudity and violence. (If you’re gonna do a naked blog, you can’t be shy about people seeing your genitalia. By the way, people who have a “my naked blog” as a ploy to get people to check out your not-naked-blog: I call bullshit on you.)

A guy I know recently mentioned a show his school was doing, and that they were censoring it somewhat. That shit makes me mad. (See, I’m cursing. Sometimes cursing is the right thing to do.)

I’m tired of polite theatre. I’m tired of pandering to a repressed audiences’ sensibilities. Take a fucking risk of offending someone. Maybe it’ll start a fucking conversation about theatre other than, “Oh that was so good...That must’ve been a lot of working learning all that lines...Didn’t little Susie sing pretty?” Fucking comfortable, middle-class, community-theatre bullshit.

Well... I wasn’t really planning on a diatribe.

I suspect this was brought on by several things; the timid nudity in the show I saw the other night; recently hearing a theatre artistic director talk about the “politics” of casting (i.e., figuring out who you need to cast for various reasons other than who would be best in what roles); someone’s mentioning that they heard other people talking about this blog who presumably aren’t talking to me about it nor commenting on the blog (there’s a significant dearth of comments on this blog); and the continuing trend of people unfriending me on the facebook (the hemorrhaging has stopped, but there’s still the occasional trickle).

Hmm...

So...
I really just wanted to say how I’d like to see that RSC Marat/Sade production.