Thursday, May 31, 2007

Some lucid remarks by the Director of a recent Italian production . . .

«I had been feeling the need for some time to return to Peter Weiss's play. It is a work which I regard as being among the finest of the Twentieth century. Marat-Sade is a classic that cannot, and must not, be conceptually linked to a specific political and social period, which does not allow itself to be bound to eminently or exclusively “political” interpretations, but which deals with an unresolved problem, the great dichotomy between “acting” and “being over-hasty”. One finds here a far-reaching reflection that is able to go beyond the militant sentiment out of which the play was written, linked to a specific historic period, to reach the heights of an articulate philosophical digression. Here, Form and Substance come together. The Form becomes structure, in which the aesthetic sign is ethical value - Form and Substance fused in an absolutely and stunningly avant-garde conception of the need and beauty of Revolution and on its contextual negation, to the greater glory of Reason and Thought. Peter Weiss clearly structures this lofty philosophical debate in the form of a Miracle Play, a Mass (supreme ritual) with choir, officiant, the sacrificial lamb, the rite of eternal blood - blood that becomes word, and word that becomes blood».
Walter Le Moli
see http://www.teatrostabiletorino.it/tst0405/catalog_view.php?lang=eng&ID=9 for the source
(The production had its National premier debut at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, on 11 January 2005.)

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