Sade's Theatrical Passions

The Theater of the Revolution

The Marquis de Sade entered theater history in 1964 when the Royal Shakespeare Company, under the direction of Peter Brook, presented a play by the unknown author Peter Weiss entitled, 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.¹ Marat/Sade, as the play is usually called, became an extraordinary success story.² By combining narrators with techniques developed in a multi-year workshop entitled "Theater of Cruelty," Marat/Sade managed to link the two modernist visionaries of the theater whom everybody had considered to be irreconcilable opposites: Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Marat/Sade not only fabricated a new revolutionary theater from the vestiges of modernism, it also coincided with a philosophical and cultural revision of the French revolution that had begun with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944/69) and found a preliminary culmination in Michel Foucault's History of Madness (1972). At the same time, the revival of Sade was fueled by the first complete publication of his work in French (1967) and by Roland Barthes' landmark study, Sade Fourier Loyola (1971).³ Marat/Sade had thus hit a theatrical and intellectual nerve.

Sade, however, belongs to theater history as more than just a character in a play. Little is known about the historical Sade's life-long passion for the theater, about his work as a theater builder and manager, an actor and director. As early as 1764, Sade had participated in amateur theatricals, rebuilt the theater at his Chateau de Lacoste, fallen in love with and sponsored various famous actresses, and during the revolutionary years, earned forty sous a day for his work in a Versaille theater. Even more important, however, are the two dozen plays Sade wrote over the course of his life, some of which received major productions in established theaters in Paris. These rather conventional plays differ markedly from Sade's notorious secret writings, including 120 Days and Justine, but also from his philosophical play, Philosophy in the Boudoir, which will be the ultimate subject of this essay. Sade's most well-known critics, including Maurice Blanchot, Jean Paulhan, Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Klossovski, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, never mentioned these plays and probably knew little about them.⁴ But they form a large portion of Sade's literary oeuvre, indeed the only continuous artistic endeavor in his volatile life. Sade's engagement with the theater opens a significant line of inquiry into his work because the theater is intimately connected to all the central questions and categories that have emerged from the critical discourse surrounding him, such as the relation between Enlightenment thought and visibility, fantasy and enactment, watching and doing. Finally, Sade's theaters highlight the way in which his life and work were shaped by the events of the French Revolution. As Marvin Carlson has argued, the theater is the most public of the art forms and therefore was affected much more immediately by the French Revolution than other genres and modes of expression.⁵ Sade's plays were attuned to the momentous changes brought about by the French Revolution, and they therefore offer a particularly nuanced picture of his contentious relation to the most significant event of his time.

Sade's dramatic oeuvre includes over twenty plays, which were unavailable even in France until the 1970s and only a portion of which have been translated into English. He arranged to have many of these plays read to the boards of the important theaters of Paris, and in several cases these readings led to successful productions. That a majority of them were finally rejected by the boards was due not to their unconventional or controversial nature, as one might expect, but, on the contrary, to the fact that they often seemed disappointingly conventional in their construction of character, plot, and form. In fact, they could not be more different from the perverse writing that has made Sade notorious. What these plays reveal is not a playwright trying to...