MADAME DE SADE. To 23 May.
London.
MADAME DE SADE
by Yukio Mishima translated by Donald Keene.
Wyndhams Theatre To 23 May 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed, Sat 2.30pm Sun 3pm.
Runs 1hr 45min No interval.
TICKETS: 0844 482 5120 (24hr)
www.donmarwestend.com (£1.50 per ticket booking-fee by ‘phone and online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 March.
De Sade – the women’s cut.
Yukio Mishima spoke English but not French. Yet the prolific Japanese author, more masochistic than sadistic perhaps, translated Racine and, in this 1965 play, used the French classicist’s dramatic technique of impassioned discussion provoked by offstage events.
This conversation piece suggests masochism’s needed around a compulsive will like Alphonse, Comte de Sade. Only in the final minute of the third, final, scene does Madame de Sade acquire the determination to abandon her devotion to her sensuously cruel husband.
That might be because she’s meeting an even stronger will, that of God. Or because when her husband arrives, he’s clearly degenerated from the self he previously was in earlier acts, set twelve and eighteen years before.
And there’s a new social mood in the final act. Charlotte, the servant, is less tidy and more truculent, for the sans-culottes are on the march. The order of 1772, when the play opens, with Renee’s concerned mother and her two friends confidently occupying the stage, their wide-spread dresses half-covering its breadth, has gone. Madame de Montreuil has long moved from supporting her daughter’s devotion to de Sade to seeking his ruin.
Degradation comes to the third of those women, the knowingly vicious Comtesse de Saint-Fond, with her enjoyment of shocking the religiously-inclined de Simione. The Comtesse ends in Marseilles, her life sounding a parody of de Sade, crazily mixing money and sex.
All this takes place in the grand ancient regime room of Madame de Montreuil’s Parisian home. But the gold and silver complexions given to Christopher Oram and his fellow-designers’ set by Neil Austin’s lighting, soon reveal the cold, empty room with its bare furnishings to be tarnished and dirt-encrusted as the rotten lives described within it.
Frances Barber, with over-ripe red lips, has a suave self-possession before Saint-Fond’s decline, while Deborah Findlay takes de Simione’s simplicity from the easily-shocked to the contentment of a nunnery’s protection. Rosamund Pike gives the loyal Madame de Sade a resolute intelligence. And Judi Dench catches the aging Montreuil effortlessly as she rises stiffly from her seat, her voice catching each inflexion of her troubled character’s mind.
Comtesse de Saint-Fond: Frances Barber.
Baroness de Simione: Deborah Findlay.
Charlotte: Jenny Galloway.
Madame de Montreuil: Judi Dench.
Anne: Fiona Button.
Renee, Madame de Sade: Rosamund Pike.
Director: Michael Grandage.
Designer: Christopher Oram.
Lighting: Neil Austin.
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.
Video/Projections: Lorna Heavey
Wigs/Hair: Richard Mawbey..
Associate director: Sam Yates.
Associate designers: Andrew Edwards, Morgan Large.
Assistant designer: Richard Kent.
2009-03-20 01:32:28