Madame De Sade is Under Fire at the Wyndham (picture courtesy of haryoung on Flickr)
WATCH OUT!! CONSIDER THIS BEFORE YOU SPEND YOUR MONEY!!!
I’ve read reviews about this show and most of them have not been pleasant. However, Dame Judi Dench is in this play and she is usually a “can’t miss” in the West End. No one can dispute her acting genius.
I haven’t gone to see this show because tickets have, initially, been hard to find.
Here are some reviews of the show by local London papers:
“The new show at the Wyndham’s looks beautiful, like a moving gallery of portraits by Joshua Reynolds. At one point, Judi Dench convinces you she might be wearing an entire priest’s vestiary, bedecked as she is with surplus frocks and surplus surplices, and bits and bobs, and a wig that might have walked off the shelf at a Crufts bring-and-buy sale…You leave this play wishing, disgracefully, that he’d had a little more success.” — Michael Coveney, The Independent– Read the rest HERE
“Michael Grandage’s success has been founded on his directorial brilliance and impeccable taste. But I fear his judgment may have wobbled in choosing to revive this discussion-drama written by Yukio Mishima in 1965…Judi Dench is also the perfect embodiment of outraged propriety as the heroine’s mother. Frances Barber as a steaming sexpot, Deborah Findlay as a pious baroness and Jenny Galloway as a surly servant all do admirable work…It’s just the play that strikes me as decadent romanticism.”–Michael Billington, The Guardian– Read the whole review HERE
“…Grandage, the king of atmosphere, has picked a play which is all mood and no motion…There are mesmerising moments, full of snakish charm. But despite its lack of real whips and chains this is truly a fetish-play, too obscurely in love with pain to dominate the broad stage.”– Caroline McGinn, Time Out–Read the whole review HERE
