Just a Few Words on Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Peter Weiss
Marat/Sade
is said to be heavily influenced by the works of director-playwrights Bertolt
Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Even a cursory look into lives, projects, and
philosophies of these two giants of 20th century theatre reveals the
links to Weiss.
Artaud (1895-1948) was an actor, director, and writer
who known for his avant garde techniques and frequent personal
problems. In 1931, he wrote Theatre and Its Double, which detailed
his concept of “Theatre of Cruelty,” which assaulted audiences with its
auditory dissonance, visual shock, and nontraditional and incongruous
staging. Artaud’s first production to fully implement his techniques was Les
Cenci (1935). His diagnosis of schizophrenia, not to
mention his heroin addiction, heavily influenced his worldview and artistic
preferences.
Brecht (1898 –1956) began life in southern
Germany as a medical student. His service in the First World War as a
hospital orderly at the front was a cause for his unending search for social
change. In 1918 he wrote Baal, his first play. Then, in 1922 he won
the Kliest Prize for Drums at Night. He then moved from Munich to Berlin,
where he divorced his first wife Marian Zalph and married Helena Weigel.
He then wrote Man is Man and his greatest success, Threepenny Opera
(1928). After 1933, he began wandering around Europe—he left Germany in
the wake of Naziism. In 1941 he ended up in Santa Monica, California,
where he developed his play Galileo with Charles Laughton. By 1936, he
had begunworking with the concept of Alienation (known as “the A-Effect”; or auf
Deutsch, “der V-Effekt”: Verfremdungseffekt), in which he
hoped to shock his audience into social consciousness. He never liked,
not did he coin the term “Epic Theatre,” which is applied to his dramatic
style. He preferred “Dialectical Theatre,” and sought to ensure the didacticism
of his shows byu rehearsing his actors 2-6 months and encouraging them to think
of their characters in the third person. He also made great use of
multimedia effects. He returned to Germany in 1947 to work with the
National Theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, in the city’s communist East.
Though
he began the 1920’s as a communist, he actually worked against the East German
government in the subliminal insurgence that characterized 
his techniques.CHORUS.htm
Weiss (1916 - 1982) was not only a writer, but also a
painter and filmmaker. Though he was born in Germany, he lived the majority of
his life in Stockholm, Sweden.
Weiss' most famous work is Marat/Sade (1963).
To quote from the text itself is, perhaps the best way to exemplify it:
"Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and
their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out.”
Weiss's literary influences include fellow Germans
Brecht and Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, American Henry Miller, in addition to
Samuel Beckett, and Dante. His visual inspiration is said to be derived
from Brueghel, Picasso, and the French surrealists. In 1965, he embraced
Communism, but rejected it again when he wrote his 1975 philosophical diatribe Die
Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance).
