Marat / Sade Style

Marat / Sade Style

Play within a Play

Weiss uses the technique of a play within a play to tell his story This layers the play and creates a certain distance for the audience whIle providing the playwright with narration to explain the work

Marat is both a character in the Inner play and is pulled to the outer play in debates with Sade. Coulmier exists in the outer play and regularly challenges what Sade, the creator of the inner play, is doing.

This technique had been used fairly extensively prior to Marat/Sade-notably in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I. As with Weiss's play, the inner play in The King and I addresses Issues that are being discussed in the outer play. The slave girl Tuptim acts out Uncle Tom's Cabin, a story that she uses as a thinly disguised critique of the King of Slam, for whom the inner play is being...
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