Sylvain Maréchal, one of the most radical figures of the French Revolution, wrote his Last Judgment of All Kings in 1793. The play was first performed shortly after the execution of Marie-Antoinette and while all the rest of Europe waged war on revolutionary France. Its plot is simple. An old man, exiled long ago from France after his daughter caught the eye of the royal court, wakes one morning to see a ship approach his desert island. A leader of the sans-culottes disembarks and explains to the audience that his ship carries all the monarchs of Europe and searches for a place to “vomit” them out. Coming across the elderly exile, the sans-culotte is delighted both to undo past royalist injustices and to discover an island that seems well suited to his cargo. The old man has survived with the help of local savages (whom, like a good, enlightened colonialist, he has attempted to teach), but has been living in constant fear of the island’s volcano, which seems ready to erupt. The monarchs are released, and soon fall to fighting amongst themselves, unable to work together to survive. Before hunger can overcome them, however, nature herself shows her displeasure and the volcano wipes them out.

This play, well-known to students of the French Revolution but scarcely outside this field, was staged in London at the end of a year’s collaborative work between students from King’s College London and the Université de Nanterre, led by Sanja Pervoci and Soizick Solman in England and Christine Berthin and Laetitia Sansonetti in France, with Simon Hatab directing and Brice Denoyer preparing surtitles. The finished piece, performed by KCL students in French, was as much adaptation as translation, an effort to convert a piece of late eighteenth-century French militant drama into something that could be performed by young people in England today.

As Sanja Perovic pointed out in a short introduction to the play, the most challenging aspects of Maréchal’s work for modern audiences were its anti-feminism, its colonialism, and the way it generated dramatic tension. The original script contains a scene in which the sans-culotte harangues Catherine the Great, reusing much of the same violently misogynist language that had been employed against Marie-Antoinette in the run up to her execution. It does not sit, for modern audiences, at all well with the passionate egalitarianism of the rest of the play, although Maréchal himself, like many of his time, found no contradiction between writing (with François-Noël Babeuf) the Manifeste des Egaux and a tract urging that women be left illiterate for the good of society. In this production, the sans-culotte’s woman-hating was answered by Catherine the Great herself (played by Katarzyna Blackman), who invoked Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) and spoke – with compelling power – lines translated from this female revolutionary’s own tracts arguing for the rights of women and exposing the injustices of the Jacobin regime. The sans-culotte, played throughout as a manic, farcical figure by Esmond Easton Lamb, was satisfyingly reduced to a gibbering wreck, unable to reply.

The strategy employed here – that of having the marginalised figure speak back to redress the imbalances of the original work – was also used to counter the play’s colonialist tendencies. Maréchal’s savage was played by a trilingual student (Emily Okuda-Overhoff), who, while the old man boasted in French of how he had educated the ignorant locals, explained, in Japanese, that she was a vulcanologist, studying signs of an imminent eruption and worrying about the increasingly hostile attitudes to immigrants present back in her own society. The contrast (created originally from improvisation) was beautifully staged here, although Japanese material was perhaps a little over-used in the rest of the play. One of the vulcanologist’s last appearances was, for example, to recite a haiku by Ozaki Hosai, closing the play with the image of footsteps swept off a beach by the action of the sea. This insertion seemed at odds with the rest of the work: it evoked erasure (either of the monarchs or of Maréchal’s own fantasy), while other elements of the production were constructed so as to perpetuate debate, and carry it forward to the present day.

These elements included the decision to break Maréchal’s short farce into three parts, and place, in the spaces opened up before and between them, three short speeches delivered by contemporary activists. The aim of this was to mitigate the third problem of the work: the fact that the Last Judgment of Kings originally drew its dramatic tension not so much from its content but the context of its first performances. Staged during the revolutionary wars, it allowed audiences and actors to imagine the hopefully imminent pan-European triumph of their radical French values. In this update, the interpolated speeches were chosen, Perovic informed us, to provide a similar level of audience involvement and contemporary edge, albeit in a far less violent key.

The first to speak was Stathis Kouvlakis, a lecturer at KCL and member of Syriza’s central committee. Telling his own experience of revolution, he drew attention to the fact that even modest changes in society required massive effort and upheaval. His words made an excellent, if critical, introduction to Maréchal’s piece, in which all the revolutionary battles have already been won, and the sans-culotte has only the problem of disposing of his captured former adversaries. The second speaker was the writer Rahila Gupta, part of the Southwall Black Sisters group. Her speech followed the extract from Olympe de Gouges’ feminist writings, and carried its concerns to the twenty-first century, as she sketched the “anatomy” of her grandmother’s life, and showed how all its trials and evils stemmed, still, from “the lack of value that is attached to a woman’s life.” After a brief return to Maréchal’s island, during which Catherine the Great and the Pope (played by Elizabeth Rider) engaged in a wonderfully awkward scrap over a crust of bread, the last activist, David Dominic, a participant in Occupy London, spoke a little. In contrast to the other invited figures, his contribution did not benefit from its context, and came across at first as under-rehearsed, in spite of the relevance of his thoughts about learning from past revolutionary movements.

However, Dominic’s speech was, in some ways, the most interesting of them all, as it exposed the tensions of the evening as a whole. It was hard for me, as an audience member and reviewer, to distinguish activist and performer: I couldn’t help but judge the aesthetic merit of each invited speaker’s words as much as their content. The production had created a remarkable and richly problematic interface between historical engagé theatre and the concerns of today. At the end of the play, and despite the words of Hosai, the event attempted to centre itself on just such an interface with a debate, led by Perovic and the invited speakers, with questions from Hatab and the audience. One of the first points made, by Rahila Gupta, was that Maréchal’s script was “pretty dire” and, she felt, scarcely connected to contemporary concerns. This view was challenged in subsequent discussion, particularly by the director, but the nervous response it elicited was typical of the tensions running through the room. A question asked from the audience was prefaced by the observation that it seemed incredible that so many people there were content to stay silent and watch the discussion, but it seemed to me that such silence was itself significant. This production was trying to do something unusual, and its success was measured in the doubts and uncertainty of those sitting in the audience, in their very silence. When Patrick ffrench, the head of KCL’s French Department rose to ask of everyone present – actor, academics, activists and audience alike – “what now?” this feeling of doubt reached its sharpest point. The question (and all it insinuated) was answered, against a backdrop of nervous titters, by Dominic, who extended, for the second time that evening, an invitation for all present to meet him afterwards in the bar, where he could suggest a range of concrete activities, not all of which he could speak of on such a public stage.

The Last Judgment of All Kings was performed on 5th June 2015 inside the Chapel of King’s College London with the support of the Cultural Institute, Centre for Enlightenment Studies and the French Department at KCL.