Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, may have detected a slight pause in my theatre visits since early April. I seem to have been diverted from Shaftesbury Avenue and the South Bank by the widespread celebrations and ceremonies that accompanied my acquisition of a bus pass. Anthopologists who would like further details of how these initiation rites into the third age are conducted in the tribal areas of southeast England can contact me by email. I've also been the victim in a murder mystery and had a walkon part as a hotel guest in a Fawlty Towers sketch (four lines of dialogue in each). Normal service is now resumed.
The translator's programme notes for Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade describe this play, written in 1965, five years before the writer's ritual suicide, as a homage to Racine. Racine's plays are famously static; all the action takes place off-stage and all the power is in the words, so I can see a superficial resemblance. I spent the part of my youth that wasn't misspent writing long essays about Racine; they're probably in a box somewhere in the loft and I can't remember what I wrote four decades ago, but I think I'm safe in saying that Racine knew how to write a play. Mishima, on the evidence of this play, clearly didn't, and seems to have totally misunderstood what the French tragedian was up to. Madame de Sade is complete tosh, and pretty unpleasant tosh. It's an extended sado-masochistic fantasy, rendered in banal English. I'm sure Donald Keene's translation is accurate, but Michael Grandage should perhaps have hired a poet to make it less literal. Here's a few sample phrases: 'She asked me to stop by on my way back from riding practice.' 'You mustn't be too hard on Mme de Montreuil.' 'Don't rush me.' 'Renee, I am so glad to see you.' 'This is like a dream.' 'It's more like waking from a nightmare.' To which, all I can say is Aaaagh!
The awful Marquis himself (referred to as Alphonse) never appears, but we hear at length from the women in his life; in ascending order of importance, Jenny Galloway is the servant Charlotte, Deborah Findlay is the Baronesse de Simiane, the voice of religion, Frances Barber is the Comtesse de Saint-Fond, an aristocratic libertine, Fiona Button is de Sade's pretty young sister-in-law Anne, Judi Dench is his mother-in-law Madame de Montreuil and Rosamund Pike is his devoted wife Renee. It's a tribute to these actresses, decked out in wonderful frocks, that they manage to rise above the dire material and make something of these cardboard symbolic characters. Frances Barber does a nice number cracking her riding crop, Deborah Findlay is transformed into a nun, Judi Dench is Judi Dench, but they're all acted off the stage by Rosamund Pike, who should earn an Olivier for her performance in the impossible role of de Sade's missus. Whether elegantly draped in eighteenth century silks, as here, or prancing around the stage in the altogether, as she did in Hitchcock Blonde a few years ago at the Royal Court, Pike is sensationally beautiful. If there were ever any doubts about the fact that her acting is just as sensational, there won't be after this role.
Never was so much talent assembled together so pointlessly. Scandalous.
Posted by: Andrew (a West End Whinger) | April 28, 2009 at 01:55 PM