Weiss's various interpretations of his own work

From a 1966 review by Samuel Weiss (published in Drama Survey issue 5):

Peter Weiss (around the time of Brook's London production): "Personally ... I am for Marat because I think the things he says are the right things to do. And I understand Sade because Sade has the pesimistic view and because Sade ... can see already Stalin in the things Marat says ... . And so my solutions very often are not clear because the world I live in is not clear."

(Sam Weiss also states that "Marat/Sade dramatizes these doubts by splitting the author's [Weiss's] warring attitudes into two seperate characters" - which makes sense in that when Sade argues with his imaginary Marat, he is arguing with himself -this also gives insight into the possible identity of our man who believes he is Sade...?)
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From David Roberts' "Peter Weiss, 'Marat/Sade' and the Revolution in the Theatre" (1969):

"a year after the premier of his play, Peter Weiss regretted an over-emphasis on the 'excessive theatrical form' of Marat/Sade, 'which was rather dangerous for some directors who were not sufficiently open to the debate … in so far as they took advantage of everything which could be overdramatically exploited. For instance the wild writhings of the patients, the uproar, this dramatic and threatening atmosphere, which is naturally very effective on the stage, but which hides the essence of the play.’"

Weiss (in interview with Sinn und Form, 1965 – also where above quote was taken from): “What particularly attracted me to the Rostock production [in which Marat is depicted as a socialist hero] was the clarity in the statements of Marat. It is clear enough that there were certain weaknesses in the production … But I do not think it matters in this case, for de Sade usually dominated in the western performances with the result that the emphasis has shifted to him. In Rostock the emphasis lay quite clearly with Marat.”
(What I find most interesting in Weiss’s shift of viewpoints is that he still wrote the play about de Sade, and this is undeniable – Marat is never a real historical figure in this play, he is always confined to the imagination of de Sade, and therefore can never truly take centre stage as a character because he is simply an offshoot of another character… but this can certainly be argued against, I guess…)

Weiss to A Alvarez in November 1964: “I stand only in the middle. I represent the third standpoint which I do not like myself … . I write in order to find out where I stand and so I must bring in all my doubts each time.”

“Weiss looks back at his earlier position in terms of his progression from de Sade to Marat in his interview in Sinn und Form: ‘… I needed a counterpart to Marat and this counterpart I found in Sade, the representative of a world not wholly bourgeois; for Sade was also a revolutionary in his way, but nevertheless a man who was so much the prisoner of his bourgeois viewpoint, that he corresponds to what we now call the representative of the third position. On the one hand he knows and realizes that society must be changed, on the other he has not himself the strength to take an active part in this transformation. He thus corresponds to my own earlier situation, to my own involvement in myself, to my inability to take the step into the outer world.’ The interpretation of Marat/Sade which Weiss now gives reveals him as the judge of the ‘third position’: ‘for me the figure of Sade is perhaps more differentiated than that of Marat because I myself have experienced and know very well the contradictions of Sade. I have constructed this Sade figure in such a way that Sade in fact undermines himself with his own arguments. Because this is the case Sade can be presented as a strong, dominating figure, in the final resort everything which Sade says adds up to the fact that the world he represents is condemned to disappear. As the end he is after all the figure who withdraws which the words of Marat remain and point to the future. It s a very complicated interplay.’”

Again from his conversation with Alvarez: “The ideal for an artist naturally would be to describe the situation in which we live so penetratingly that people when they read it or experience it on stage would say on the way home: ‘This must be changed. It can’t go on like this. We won’t put up with it any longer.’”

Weiss’s 10-point declaration about committed writing (entitled “Necessary Decision” – published in 1965) opens with this statement: “Every word I write and publish is political, that is to say, it aims at contact with large groups in the population in order to attain a certain effect.”