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Madame de Sade

Published Thursday 19 March 2009 at 11:20 by John Thaxter

Yukio Mishima’s one-note play looks at the Marquis de Sade through the eyes of the six women who knew him best - his complicit wife, his in-laws, their maidservant and a couple of noblewomen whose loins were disturbed by his reputation for sex with a whip and a crucifix. But not the desperate whores who suffered his vicious cruelty in exchange for a gold louis and a poisonous bonbon.

Throughout the 18-year period covered by the play de Sade is absent, locked up in various prisons until, at the last moment, fat and dishevelled, he comes banging on the front door while his wife disowns him as a prelude to her taking the veil.

In the past Donald Keene’s translation has made for long-winded evenings of cherry-blossom ritual or low-key exchanges in a grubby mansion about to be stormed by the Parisian mob. But Michael Grandage’s swift, witty staging enjoys the benefit of a setting of glittering French luxury (designer Christopher Oram) peopled by women in the height of contemporary fashion - costumes that chart the passage of time from aristocratic opulence to revolutionary austerity.

The play remains a wordy delineation of de Sade’s philosophy of cruelty, with soaring poetic episodes, but a brilliant cast breathes life and variety into the repetitive text, starting with Frances Barber’s whip-cracking Contesse de Saint-Fond reciting the Marquis’ catalogue of crime as a raunchy prologue into the ears of Deborah Findlay’s easily shocked Baronesse de Simiane.

Judi Dench makes an impressively unstarry entry as his mother-in-law while rekindling the powerful dynamics of her RSC Lady Macbeth in a role that enjoys some of the best lines. Fiona Button delivers a delicious performance as Anne, recalling her blissful days and nights in Venice with her wicked brother-in-law. But the performance of the evening comes from Rosamund Pike in the title role, growing from a submissive young wife with a romantic view of her debauched husband into case-hardened maturity, giving breathtaking power and urgency to the final scenes.

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