Bastille Day: Don’t Make Us Wait Anymore!

Four years after the revolution
And the old king’s execution
Four years after I remember how
Those courtiers took their final vow

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests
Let them live on their fat

Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell

Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their ass

Good old Marat by your side we’ll stand or fall
You’re the only one that we can trust at all

Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest
The businessman, the bourgeois, the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
Of the sons of the ass-licking dying regime

We’ve got new generals,
Our leaders are new
They sit and they argue
And all that they do
Is sell their own colleagues
And ride upon their backs
And jail them
And break them
And give them all the axe
Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all

Marat we’re poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don’t make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don’t care how
We want our revolution now

Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power
Why why why
Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We’ve got nothing
Always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes

Marat we’re poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don’t make us wait anymore
Poor old Marat they hunt you down
The bloodhounds are sniffing all over the town
Poor old Marat you work ’til your eyes turn as red as rust

Poor old Marat
We trust in you …

5 Responses to “Bastille Day: Don’t Make Us Wait Anymore!”

  1. For more on transgender performance artist (and Radical Faerie) Mx Justin Vivian Bond: http://justinbond.com

  2. Thanks for posting this and reminding me of Marat/Sade. I just discovered that my library has the DVD so I can finally give up my old VCR copy. If you don’t have a DVD available, most of Marat/Sade is posted on YouTube in different segments. My favorite lines are in Marat/Sade 8/x in YouTube. Starting 6:10 into the segment. Spoken by Marat – a very young Ian Richardson.

    • Sean P,

      True story, my mother sang this song as she gave birth to me.

      That Peter Brook production of Marat/Sade with Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson and the great Ian Richardson (House of Cards!) you mention is a wonderful piece of art. A bad production of Marat/Sade can be painful, a great one amazing. I still get more and more out of the play. It is profound. Good that your local library has a copy of the DVD, a friend sent me one not two months ago. The library is the one institution of the bourgeois state I would like to keep. And to vastly expand. Agreed, the speech you cite is, indeed, one the best:

      Don’t be deceived
      when our Revolution has been finally stamped out
      and they tell you
      things are better now
      Even if there’s no poverty to be seen
      because the poverty’s been hidden
      even if you ever got more wages
      and could afford to buy
      more of these new and useless goods
      which these new industries foist on you
      and even if it seems to you
      that you never had so much
      that is only the slogan of those
      who still have much more than you

      Rustbelt.

  3. Much as I am so familiar — after 40 years — with the Peter Brook production on film, both it and the translation detracted from the original work’s focus. Music was great. Staging superb — but the shrill histrionics a la Antonin Artaud confused the pitch. While Weiss was strongly embedded in surrealism — and Kafka — his main game was — mostly as his novels are obscure — getting at the politics or point of his drama. I think this interpretation by Bond pulls us back to a sort of Brechtian intent missing from Brook.

    Thanks so much for sharing it.

    Ironic anecdote: Weiss best friend was Herman Hess. The guy was many things.

    To get Weiss’s measure and marvel at his dramaturgy (as he worked as such for Erwin Piscator) read ‘The Investigation’ based on the transcripts of Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials.

    From my POV it has been Weiss and the English socialist playwright Edward Bond, who have tackled and resolved many of the issues with advancing a committed written theatre in the mould of what Brecht and his collaborators (like Piscator) and precursors in Russia instigated.

    • Thanks a lot for your comments Dave, they are appreciated. I agree with you re: Justin Bond’s Brecthian interpretation. I’ll certainly have to read the Investigation. Weiss is definitely an interesting writer, I’m unaware of Edward Bond but will search him out. Best, RR

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