Hundreds walk out of RSC play packed with sex, rape, torture and nudity

Oct 23 2011 by Adam Aspinall, Sunday Mercury

IT is the play so sickening that more than 200 people have walked out, unable to stomach the Royal Shakespeare Company’s diet of sex, nudity, rape and torture.

Since controversial play Marat/Sade opened ten days ago at Stratford-upon-Avon’s renowned Royal Shakespeare Theatre, around 30 people a night have been leaving early.

Shocking scenes are so explicit that on one night alone up to 80 people quit the newly refurbished theatre more used to William Shakespeare’s classics, in disgust.

Marat/Sade is set in a lunatic asylum in revolutionary France where the infamous Marquis de Sade is directing a play about the last days of political thinker Jean Paul Marat using inmates as actors.

Written by Swedish playwright Paul Weiss, it has been shocking audiences around the world since it was first performed in 1963.

But the new production – specially commissioned to mark the RSC’s 50th birthday – is the most sickening yet.

Amongst a host of bizarre scenes, audiences are stunned as a dwarf performs a sex act on a bishop, there are multiple scenes of masturbation, and a clergyman breaks wind on the heads of asylum inmates.

In one lengthy scene a transvestite, who later dons an Islamic burqa, is chained up and repeatedly tortured with a taser electric shock gun.

But the part of the play which has most disturbed patrons is one in which actor Nicholas Day, who has starred in family-friendly shows such as Minder, Lovejoy and Midsomer Murders, is sodomised in a rape scene.

Theatregoer Kate Dee, 25, from Worcester, was one who left the theatre at the interval.

“I knew it was supposed to be edgy but in reality it was the worst kind of filth dressed up as quality theatre,” she said. “There are ways one can stimulate an audience with dignity and guile but this performance lacked any such wit.

“It was utter filth and depravity. The rape scene came just before the interval and many people did not return for the second half.