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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. After the play by Peter Weiss, adapted by Iouri Lioubimov. Taganka Theatre (Moscow), Festival d'Avignon, France. 15 July 2000.
In the revived Taganka Theatre's adaptation, Peter Weiss's 1963 ritual-drama takes on the character of a music-hall farce - a revolution betrayed by those tap, tap, tapping feet. Weiss's re-staging of the Marquis de Sade's asylum theatrical becomes, under director Iouri Lioubimov's hand, a fragile pretext for the Taganka's engaging comic diversions, acrobatic displays, and exhibitions of terpsichorean talent.
Since its premiere in Moscow in 1998, this Marat/ Sade has been hailed in Russia as something of a return, after years of internal dissension and outside disruption, to the high standards of innovation, social protest, and joy that characterized the Taganka's glory years from 1963 to 1983. That Lioubimov here joins bel canto to rap, circus acrobatics to minimalist dance abstraction, in a manner that no longer seems new, demonstrates that the idioms he and relatively few others developed in the 1960s and early 1970s are now the shared resources of contemporary high-art theatre in Europe and the United States. What is remarkable is the manner in which these anti-psychological practices neutralize and, at the same time, complicate Marat/Sade's metatheatrical conceit.
Lioubimov's production works as a kind of antimeditation - a kind of studied avoidance of systematic reflection - on the revolution in theatre practice that he participated in and helped...