Sex, drugs and frocks for de Sade

10 April 2012

When it comes to straight plays, or even bent ones, few more weird or perverse than Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade can have hit the staid West End stage this century. What can have incited Dame Judi Dench, landed with an unrewarding role in which she appears arrayed in high, upstanding hair and gold-hued dresses that billow out as if there were a giant colander beneath each of them, to lend the production her enormous box-office appeal? Anyone, though, who hopes the play’s title serves as a coded come-on for sado-masochists in search of a bad time, complete with scenes of sexual degradation performed with titillating realism, will be cruelly disappointed.

The impurity of Madame de Sade lies in its thoughts not its deeds. Michael Grandage’s production could be called escapist: designer Christopher Oram’s beautiful, silver-walled salon, which undergoes the evocative transformations of Lorna Heavey’s video projections, and Adam Cork’s music all threaten to upstage the play and distract from its tedium. Grandage struggles to animate Mishima’s arid sequence of formal, sub-romantic speeches in which de Sade is viewed from the perspective of five interested women.

Rosamund Pike’s Madame de Sade represents submissive, wifely devotion; her sister immorality; her mother — Dame Judi’s stately Madame de Montreuil — orthodox morality; Frances Barber’s lascivious, whip-cracking Comtesse uninhibited sexuality and Deborah Findlay’s prim Baronesse religious fervour. Yet the clash of debate is always avoided. In Racine’s plays, which Madame de Sade faintly resembles, passion wars with duty and conscience. Here the women baldly narrate their lives and give laboured vent to their dullish feelings.

Mishima, a major 20th century Japanese writer who committed a grisly form of suicide in 1970, seeks to persuade us that sado-masochism, in some shapes and forms, is a natural, even inevitable component of human behaviour and sexuality, not to be ranked as a shameful, illicit aberration.

The assertion is channelled through Pike’s demure, long-suffering Madame de Sade, who in the course of three acts and 18 years professes a serious faith in her husband, while off-stage he is organising orgies, beating or sodomising prostitutes, drugging them with Spanish Fly, which is an aphrodisiac rather than a top sherry, and languishing in prison. Mishima’s interest was in why the loyal Madame de Sade refused to see her husband ever again after he emerged from jail. Not that he really answers his own question: Madame decides to become a nun and explains that de Sade’s novel Justine showed he had no heart and had "built a back stair way to heaven," as Donald Keene’s often absurd translation puts it. "He toils and gathers the honey of tenderness under the dazzling summer sun. He is a worker bee of pleasure," is a typical Keene sentence.

The play’s weirdness — its refusal to deal adequately with problems posed by sado-masochism — does not disguise the fascination of the questions it implicitly raises. Why is it now as in the 18th century usually women who succumb to masochism at the hands of sadistic men like de Sade?

Madame De Sade
Wyndham's Theatre
Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0DA

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