Madame de Sade

Japanese author Yukio Mishima's play is like death by a thousand cuts: it's a subtle, slow and sometimes nonsensical dissection of de Sade's philosophy of pain. Michael Grandage, the king of atmosphere, has picked a play which is all mood and no motion. Twenty years advance like verdigris over the mottled, marbled backdrop, as Madame de Sade (Rosamund Pike) suffers exquisitely in her mother's house, a self-proclaimed 'monster of devotion' to her spouse. She, her mother, her naughty red-haired sister and their friends get their kicks from torturing each other about their respective intimacies with the infamous Marquis. As male fantasies go, the five women are a 'Spice Girls' of high class vice. But the blood, bruises and naked skin are heard, not seen. Writer Yukio Mishima is so in love with the high literary aesthetic of sado-masochism that he fails to put anything so degraded as an action on stage. And why don't any of de Sade's common victims get a word in? Pike is stunningly committed as de Sade's wife, and there are mesmerising moments, but this is truly a fetish-play, too obscurely in love with pain to dominate the broad stage.