İzmir avant-garde theater opens season with murder of Marat

One-woman plays are risky business - particularly when they aim to condense a complicated play within a play that addresses many different concepts, such as revolution, civil disobedience, murder and insanity.

However, a group of young actors from İzmir known as Praxis Perform have managed to create a one-hour performance out of one of the most difficult plays of the 1960s by Peter Weiss, "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," usually shortened to "Marat/Sade." At a time when the 60s spirit of rebellion, dissent and independence has been remembered with Bob Dylan's Nobel Literature Prize award, the play by the German-Swiss writer is another reminder of the "aesthetics of resistance."

Imagine the Marquis de Sade deciding to put on a play while locked in the Charenton mental hospital. He writes and directs the other mental health patients in a play based on the death of Jean-Paul Marat, the unrelenting, single-minded architect of the French Revolution. As "Marat/Sade" progresses, the inmates become more and more possessed by the violence of the play and become extremely difficult to control. Then hell breaks loose. With its long dialogues, moments of "crazy range," and long list of characters, the play is not one for popular taste. A 1967 movie inspired by the play, with its cast of strong Shakespearean actors - featuring Ian Richardson as Marat and Glenda Jackson as his murderer Charlotte Corday - was received positively by high-brow critics but had little popular success.

"Marat/Sade" had a revival at the turn of the 21st century. In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged it with Marat as a modern digital revolutionary and...