Madame de Sade
Wyndhams
New Boy
Trafalgar Studio
In the 1960s Mishima wrote a play about the Marquis de Sade. What’s it like? It’s like this. A Greek tragedy consisting entirely of choral speeches performed on the radio. The naughty nobleman’s wife and her family are assembled on stage, along with a pair of sidekicks, one a tart, the other a nun, and through the testimony of these blushing womenfolk we hear the details of his rapacious career. Static, word-heavy and often boring, the play is far from a disaster. That de Sade never appears barely matters. He’s in prison, in court, in hiding, in Sardinia, in a hay-loft, in prison again. Finally, after two decades of blood-soaked fornication, he’s at the front porch. Will he come in? No, says the maidservant, he’s so fat he can’t get through the door-frame. Oh, go on, girls, tug him in and let’s have a look. The image of the great Lothario as an ageing lard-bucket too corpulent to squeeze into his wife’s vast mansion got less of a laugh than it deserved and it’s to Michael Grandage’s credit that this unwieldy play has been given such a stylish and spirited production.
The script is an ice-cap with wedding cake decorations. Great frosty cliffs of speechifying adorned with scrolls of florid verbage. Nearly always Mishima reaches for the same imagery. De Sade is a high priest, his seductions are a holy sacrifice, his life is an imperishable cathedral of wickedness. Christopher Oram’s distressed-mirror sets are stupendously lovely and they give the show some much-needed uplift and playful splendour. But one has to ask why the all-star cast signed up for this behemoth. Doubtless each looked at the great mounds of treacly text they’d have to deliver and said yes, yes, yes.
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