Peter Brook and the Film Production of Marat/Sade It is noted within Margaret Croyden’s book, Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets, in the extremely interesting and informative tenth chapter, entitled “The Achievement of Peter Brook: From Commercialism to the Avant-Garde”, that near the start of his career, Brook was attracted to both plays and techniques that expressed human contradiction. He often wondered, though, whether there were any modern playwright who could possibly equal the richness and complexity of Shakespearean verse, and often complained about the improbability of ever finding material to work on or to produce as stimulating as that of Shakespeare (Croyden 238). When, in 1964, Brook received a play entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade), by German playwright Peter Weiss, it is also noted that Brook felt he had finally encountered the challenge of Shakespearean theater he was looking for (Croyden 238). One does not need to look too closely at Brook’s adaptation on the theory of the Theater of Cruelty (which, in its simplest terms, involved specific dramatizations of sound and movement, fragmented montages, and happenings as well as the healthy influence of French theater theorist Antonin Artaud, whose primary interests lay in the spectacle of theater) to see how well Marat/Sade exemplified the most important points of the new approach to theater Brook was beginning to experiment with (Croyden 235). Not only was Marat/Sade an incredibly well written and unique approach to theater as a whole, its incorporation of music and movement, song and montage, and naturalism and surrealism within the text created the perfect passage, for Brook, from his commercial past to his experimental present, as well as a way for both the playwright and the director to deal with the concept of theater a...
