Heady evening entertainment

Thursday evening I finally saw the movie Quartet. One of my church friends kept telling me I would love it. My verdict: Wonderful to see a movie built around classical music. Many of the secondary characters actually had careers in opera or classical music. Fine performances by the leads (to be expected when Maggie Smith is one of them). Some interesting and quirky characters. And a predictable story -- didn't Mickey Rooney and friends perfect the plot of doing a show to save a beloved institution and having to convince a recalcitrant person to join them and didn't they do that more than a half century ago?


Last evening I went to the Hilberry Theatre to see Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. When I was an undergrad (um, 37 years ago) I took a class in theater lighting design. So I was part of the lighting crew when the college put on that play. It seems we had one too many people in the class because I had to be there for every show but didn't have all that much to do other than watch it.

Alas, I didn't remember much of it and this interpretation was quite different from what the college had done. This one even had singers. The play-within-a-play tells the story of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the firebrand writers behind the French Revolution. Many of his ideas eventually evolved into socialism. The author put him together with the Marquis de Sade, whose name became the root of sadism. So we have the peasants demanding Marat give them their rights, Marat expounding on how to overthrow the powers of the time and what kind of society could be the replacement, and de Sade poking holes in Marat's thinking. To make it even more interesting all the characters of the interior play are played by residents of an insane asylum. The exception is de Sade, who is directing the play (and apparently wading into the midst of it). A heady brew for an evening's entertainment.

One thing the de Sade character said stuck with me. It is a criticism of socialism (or perhaps of communism). Suppose you have a society in which everyone is doing a job they love (I guess one of the ideas of socialism). What happens if a worker aspires to better him or herself? Does he hit a ceiling beyond which there is no advancement? Do leaders or administrators have to force him back into place?