Weiss, Peter Ulrich

Weiss, Peter Ulrich (1916–82), German dramatist and novelist, resident after 1939 in Sweden. First known as a graphic artist and novelist, he gained international renown with his first play, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Charenton Asylum under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, 1964). Known briefly as the Marat/Sade, it shows Sade and Marat in the asylum's bath-house, debating their contrasting philosophies of absolute individualism and unswerving dedication to social revolution, while the historical events leading up to Marat's assassination are acted out by the increasingly unruly lunatics. Peter Brook produced it later the same year in London with the RSC (NY, 1965). Its success led to the simultaneous production in 14 German theatres of Weiss's next play Die Ermittlung (1965), which, as The Investigation, was given a rehearsed reading in London, again under Brook, and was produced in New York in 1966. One of a wave of ‘documentary dramas’ (see DOCUMENTARY THEATRE), it was based on the transcript of the 1964 Frankfurt War Crimes Trial, and attempts to apportion the blame for the Auschwitz atrocities. This, like the Marat/Sade and Der Turm (The Tower, 1967), was published in English, as was Die Versicherung (The Insurance, 1969), a Surrealist allegory in which men and beasts intermingle. An earlier play, Gesang vom lusitanischen Popanz (1967), an account of the uprising in Angola and its suppression by the Portuguese, was staged, as Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in 1968 and London in 1969. A documentary on the war in Vietnam followed, its cumbersome title being shortened to Viet Nam Diskurs (Vietnam Discourse, 1968). After an excursion into more popular entertainment with Wie dem Herrn Mockingpott das Leiden ausgetrieben wird (How Mr Mockingpott was Relieved of his Sufferings, also 1968), in which the chief characters are two clowns, Mockingpott and Wurst, Weiss reverted to documentaries with Trotzki in Exil (1970), which portrayed Trotsky not only as literally an exile from his own country but as an exile of the mind, and Hölderlin (1971), presenting the poet as the archetypal revolutionary writer.