The sudden and unexpected death of Peter Weiss in Stockholm, at the age of 65, robbed the world not only of one of its greatest play. wrights but certainly of the greatest Marxist He is perhaps best known in Britain for his Marat Sade, written in 1964 and later brilliantly directed by Peter Brook at the Aldwych Theatre. This play dealt with the bourgeois revolution, the Great French Revolution, and it was during his research for this work and its production that Peter Weiss became a convinced socialist, which he re.
Socialist Challenge the chiet interest in Peter Weis. : with his play Trotsky in Exile.
Although he had joined the Communist Par.
retained his considerable critical faculties. Just as the theme of Marat Sade was the bourgeois revolution, his Trot. sky in Exile dealt with 'the forty odd years of socialist revolution In this play Weiss examines the October men and ideas submerged by official Stalinist history. It reveals Weiss as a thoroughgoing Marxist with an extraordinary skill in combining his craftsmanship as a playwright with the Marx.
Trial, based on presently running to was Perhaps his the three-volume The Aesthetics of the Resistance, a semi-fictional account of the history of the German Communist Party. After a visit to that country, he created a scenic collage of 2,000 years of Viet namese history, which made a great impression when it was shown in both East and West Germany. His Canto of the Lusitanian Bogeyman, exposing Portuguese colonialism in Africa and his Oratorio in Eleven Cantos on the Auschwitz Trial, were other facets of his Socialist Challenge salutes the memory of Peter Weiss who sought, in his play on Trot. sky 'to sketch the historical truth and to do be a fight against socialism, for socialism, the truth of our century, has no need of crutches built on lies Mandel on Peter Weiss' Trotsky in Exile (Spokesman The Other Bookshop, 328 Up Socialist Challenge 21 May 1982 page 15