In this its 50th anniversary year, the RSC is rightly revisiting past triumphs. One of the biggest - not to mention most unlikely - was Peter Brook's now legendary 1964 production, starring Glenda Jackson and Ian Richardson, of Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell's verse translation of the German hit drama from Peter Weiss. It was a key example of the short-lived Theatre of Cruelty movement and struck a political chord in uncertain Cold War times. Sadly, it's not ageing well.
The play's cumbersome full title - The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - sets the scene.
The year is 1808, Napoleon rules France and the liberal prison governor Coulmier (Christopher Ettridge) has perhaps not chosen wisely in allowing the volatile de Sade (Jasper Britton) free rein over prison theatricals. Cue a lengthy clash of Marat's idealism with de Sade's individualism, plus some eye-wateringly graphic sex scenes.
It's intriguing to try to demarcate the deliberately blurred boundaries between the play-within-a-play and the play itself but there is baggy philosophising everywhere. Director Anthony Neilson throws everything at his hyperactive modern-dress production - French Revolutionary leader Marat (Arsher Ali) sits in his fatal bathtub with a laptop - yet it remains hard to take much from it. The spirited ensemble certainly gives it their all, and Britton plays the Marquis with relish, but this looks more like a historical curio than a piece of vital modern theatre.
In rep until November 5 (0844 800 1110, rsc.org.uk)
