Between 1797 and 1811, the Director of the Charenton Asylum, M. Coulmier, established regular theatrical entertainment in his clinic as part of the therapeutic treatment of his patients.

The Marquis de Sade, an inmate of Charenton from 1803 until his death in 1814, wrote and directed many of these entertainments, and it became fashionable in Paris to visit the asylum, as much to watch the antics of the inmates as to watch the performances.

The production was performed in the St. Xavier’s College auditorium, and the audience was made to sit in the balconies above the hall and voyeuristically look in on the inmates’ lives. The audience was placed far away from the ‘mad’ people down below, in order to give the illusion that they were at a safe distance from the danger and fights erupting below. A lot of gory singing and rioting took place during the show, including a man’s head being chopped off on stage.

Eventually, at the end of the play, the inmates murdered the Governor and the guards of the asylum for mistreating them. After this, they climbed up into the balconies where the real audiences sat and shook them out of their chairs, running out onto the roads screaming about revolution. The audience members were not happy about this, and Theatre Group received a lot of threatening letters after the show.

The full title of the play is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Alyque decided to stage the production at St. Xavier’s College, with Gerson da Cunha playing the Marquis de Sade.

Deryick Jefferies designed the sets for the play. He was a very ingenious engineer. He and Alyque designed the guillotine for the production, creating an extraordinarily realistic execution in which the head appeared to be detached from the body. Alyque never disclosed how he managed to achieve this effect.

The scene was so realistic that the late Pravin Joshi, one of the Gujarati stage’s most outstanding directors, told Alyque that he had leaped out of his seat, believing a genuine accident had occurred when he saw the severed head lying on the floor.

The actor playing the aristocrat who was to be beheaded placed his neck gingerly in the slot. He looked up apprehensively at the gleaming blade, eight feet above his head.

The drums rolled, and at the cymbal clash, the executioner released the rope. The blade flashed downwards. The aristocrat screamed as one of the safety catches gave way, and the blade hovered half an inch away from his exposed neck.

Alyque rushed forward shouting, “I’m going to decapitate the carpenter who built this lousy guillotine!”

According to the actor’s distraught wife, he suffered nightmares for months afterwards and even developed chronic insomnia.

Alyque Padamsee staged Marat/Sade in Bombay in 1969, approximately five years after Peter Brook’s landmark 1964 London production for the Royal Shakespeare Company.