Stage Play: Judi Dench and Rosamund Pike's Madame de Sade to debut next Friday

As previously posted here (Rosamund Pike bonds with Judi Dench in Madame De Sade) back in August 2008.

Now, here's an update:

Telegraph.co.uk has a new article and photo of P&P/Die Another Day co-stars Judi Dench and Rosamund Pike with the rest of the cast.

Read the article below:

Madame de Sade: Hara-kiri, sex and six women

Female voice: The six wives in Madame de Sade

What drove the writer of a play about the libidinous Frenchman to disembowel himself?

Next Friday, a little-known Japanese play, Madame de Sade, will have its West End debut at the Donmar Warehouse, this year in residency at Wyndham's Theatre. It should be a night to remember. The play's subject is the infamous Marquis de Sade; the play's author, Yukio Mishima, was a celebrated Japanese writer and masochist who committed hara-kiri in 1970, five years after Madame de Sade was first performed. Mishima's death was as plotted as anything he achieved in his brief and busy lifetime: self disembowelment with an ancient samurai dagger followed by decapitation by a friend. As it happened, his suicide was so botched (his head, rather than being removed in one clean sweep, was slowly hacked from his neck) that instead of symbolising the warrior spirit of ancient Japanese culture, it became the object of tabloid mockery.

With their shared interests in sex, pain, and the beauty of death, the post-war Japanese imperialist and the so-called "father" of the French Revolution make ideal bedfellows. De Sade does not, however, appear in Mishima's play, which spans a period of 18 years over three acts. Instead his character is explored through the drawing-room conversation, or rather what Mishima called the ''collisions of ideas'', between six cultivated women in the marquis's inner circle. They include his loyal wife, Renee, Madame de Sade (played by Rosamund Pike); her deceitful sister, Anne (Fiona Button), who has also been de Sade's lover; and her disapproving mother, Madame de Montreuil (Judi Dench). Three further figures, played by Frances Barber, Deborah Findlay, and Jenny Galloway, add their own opinions to the play's polite conversation about perversity.


Read full article @ telegraph.co.uk.