A Matter of Taste

Frankly, I think there's far too much sex and violence gets by in the name of entertainment. I mean, I go to the theatre to be taken out of myself. I don't want to see lust and rape and incest and sodomy! I can get all that at home.
Beyond the Fringe

People are walking out of a modern-dress revival of a 1963 stage play, citing "utter filth and depravity". I haven't seen the production, and for all I know it may very well have the kind of witless, bludgeoning sensibility so fashionable these days and known as "torture porn" or "situationist daring", depending on whether one is speaking of genre movies or of Michael Haneke's lesser works. Still, it may be noteworthy that the original 1964 production by Peter Brook elicited very similar reactions from those who expected more dignity and guile, and less sex, violence and screaming, in a play titled 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 and set, as the Guardian hath it, "in a mental asylum during the French revolution"; or during the First Empire, if one follows the mere playscript.