At last, the polo-necked vegans of Stoke Newington have their own fringe theatre. Admittedly, it's virtually Dalston and only a stone's throw from Hackney Central, but Mehmet Ergen's laudable new enterprise (since parting company with the Southwark Playhouse), is long overdue. After all, this area boasts the highest number of artists per square inch in Europe.
More importantly, the local community is well served by this courageous opening production of Peter Weiss's 1964 play that dissects the relationship of the individual and the state. The setting is an asylum, housing the master of corporal perversion, the Marquis De Sade, and the twisted executioner of the French revolution, Jean Paul Marat. Weiss has the inmates perform a play written by de Sade and featuring the soon-to-be-murdered Marat.
The Sixties subject matter is not dated, but elements of the staged debate have slipped from the contemporary political agenda. Pitching de Sade's individualism against Marat's collectivism, the former position is more to modern Western taste, while the latter is usually dismissed as Stalinism. But, the asylum's inmates, playing the French people, unwittingly satirise both views. They cheerfully accept and resist the dictates of either man, rendering both equally absurd.
Michael Cabot's ambitious production weaves the play's themes into a multi-faceted sensory experience with the energy and impertinence of a Weimar musical cabaret. Nuance is sometimes lost in rowdier moments, but Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell's translation sparkles with satirical wit and intellectual clarity. However, it's Geraldine Bunzl and Fiona Hankey's design that dominates this former factory space, with atmospheric drapes and candles, while the play's dialectical oppositions are represented from opposing platforms.
David Bradshawe as de Sade is the most physically fastidious character - dressed in period finery, he elaborates his pleasure-seeking individualism with arch rhetorical tropes. Brian Douglas as the censuring governor fumes and fulminates, but Alexander Arkell as Marat perpetually confined to a bath of cold water, is paradoxically the most corporeal presence. The remaining cast of 22 form an amusingly unpredictable chorus of mad folk, nicely subverting the protagonists' symmetrical certainties.
Marat/Sade
