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.

Dr Sade, an inmante 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 lunatics as to watch the performance.

The production was performed in the hall of 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 down below. A lot of gory singing and rioting took place during the show, including a man’s head being chopped off on stage. Evenutally 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 and ran out into 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 actual 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 do this at St. Xaviers College, Gerson played Sade,

Deryick Jefferies designed the sets for this play. He was a very ingenious engineer. He and Alyque designed the guillotine for this play, and during the performance Alyque actually managed to execute a very realistic looking execution, where the head was detached from the body. Alyque never disclosed how he managed to do that.

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

The actor who was playing the aristocrat 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!”

The poor actor had nightmares for months afterwards and even developed chronic insomnia, according to his distraught wife.

AP produced this play in Bombay within a few months from the play being staged for the first time in the West End.