Madame De Sade

The reviewers have got it wrong about Michael Grandage's Madame De Sade starring Judi Dench at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End; it is a fantastic play. No one who has any sympathy with Peter Brook's theory of theatre in The Empty Space could think that the play is too word heavy - the play is not just about what happens on the stage, but what happens in the mind. What happens on the stage is secondary to what is happening in the mind - that is, if the viewer is also a listener. The special effects did such things to Rosamund Pike's final speech that I am sure that speech alone could have won her the whoops and cheers she got from the audience at the curtain call. And the dresses were dazzling along with an aesthetically decorated and angled set.

Perhaps the reviewers would have been kinder if the Marquis de Sade who, the maid tells us at the end of the final act, has turned up at his wife's door a decrepid wreck of a man after 18 years in prison and for whom his devoted wife has spent years pining, had not been turned away by the very same wife minutes after her extolling him as a man of God in a final revelation (which will see her enter a convent), but had been permitted to walk on to the stage for us all to see. That, however, would have defeated the whole point.