Peter Weiss' The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat: As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade [a Play]

In December 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964), in a presentation by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, stormed the Broadway stage, captivating audience and critic alike. The assumption that the play about the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday might have been one of the many dramatic pieces written by Sade---and enacted by his fellow inmates for "therapeutic" reasons during the Marquis's confinement at Charenton---provided Weiss (who maintained that "every word I put down is political") with his framework for the "confrontation of the revolutionary Marat as the apostle of social improvement and the cynical individualist, the Marquis de Sade" (N.Y. Times). The Investigation (1965), which Weiss considered his best play, was first presented in 20 theaters in East and West Germany; Ingmar Bergman (see Vol. 3) was its Swedish director. It was staged in New York in 1966. Taken almost entirely from the actual proceedings of the 1965 Frankfurt War Crimes Tribunal on Auschwitz, The Investigation is a "harrowing but insistently commanding experience" (Walter Kerr, N.Y. Times). The audience, in effect, reenacts the role of the original courtroom spectators in this shattering, true account of man's depravity. Weiss received the Buchner Prize in 1982.