1806. Insane asylum. Charenton. France. The Marquis de Sade, sentenced to life, starts recording thoughts and philosophies that have scandalised the whole nation.
2012. New theatre venue at the White Rabbit Cocktail Club. London. UK. Second Skin Theatre’s fifth season opens with Doug Wright’s Obie-award winning play Quills , a re-imagining of the Marquis de Sade’s incarceration at Charenton’s insane asylum.
What is the role of censorship? Can a quill became a weapon? What weapons do institutions have to use to restore morality?
In Quills, the Marquis de Sade is the centre of a discussion about the meaning of freedom, the freedom of challenging the current morality and pushing the boundaries of the current hypocrisy. He appears as a fresh character that has no limits to his creativity. When he sees his right to write with ink and paper negated, he starts to use bed sheets and wine and when also this becomes too scary for the institutions, he uses the only source of writing possible without tools: his blood. An endless stream of words that digs into the hidden needs of human beings, the secret sexual desires that we do not have access to in our conscious life. He does it without fear. He writes everything, demonstrating the power of words and the effort society makes to silence scary and untold truths.
Spectators are attracted by the strength of the Marquis’s character, willing to carry on with his art in order to show that the consequences of art are not art’s fault but a result of human nature. We are carried with him in a fight against the conventions of political institutions, Church and society, represented also by his comical wife (performed brilliantly by Lauren Kellegher) who epitomises all the opportunism of a world were every sexual desire must be restrained and locked out of sight.
Horrified and amused by Quills, spectators follow the attempts of different characters to ‘save’ both the status quo and the Marquis. The attempts at rescuing him from his madness (the madness of the arts?) will only end up transforming the written cruelty into real tortures.
Until November 11, 2012
White Rabbit Cocktail Club in Stoke Newington
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