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

“By Peter Weiss”

At the Charenton asylum, the Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee) stages a play about the death of Jean-Paul Marat (Ian Richardson), and he casts the patients to perform it. Peter Brook, who first mounted it for the Royal Shakespeare Company, keeps the film close to that stage production. Sade writes and directs from his chair, a prisoner shaping other prisoners into a revolution that he cannot stop himself from picking apart.