Dame Judi Dench has returned to the London stage in a play that is as unorthodox as its author's life, writes MARY RUSSELL

SM JUST ain’t what it used to be, its practice tamed and incorporated into the norm by the fact that nowadays you can pop into your neighbourhood Ann Summers or adult shop and find an array of naughty, saucy outfits with accessorised whips and handcuffs. Perhaps this liberality, which some might condemn as licentiousness, is due, among other things, to the work of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who brought it all out into the open thereby turning into accessible fun what had previously been been sinful and forbidden, although possibly more pleasurable for being so.

Remember the mantra, if you didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t a sin? But pain, and its sometime bedfellow pleasure, must surely have a place, comfortable or otherwise, in the hearts of anyone educated in what used to be called Catholic Ireland, where punishment and reward were the order of the day as it also undoubtedly was in a revolutionary and equally Catholic France.

Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s play Madame de Sade, currently in London’s West End and starring Judi Dench, takes a sideways look at the power politics of the Marquis de Sade, the man who gave us sadism. His sexual proclivities are seen through the eyes of six women: his wife, his mother-in-law (Dench), his sister-in-law, an earlier lover, a servant, and an easily shocked aristocrat. Debauchery, decadence and degradation are all here, not to mention an interesting Christmas special during which the Marquis suspended his naked wife from a chandelier and instructed one of his young men to pleasure her private parts.

But no, we don’t see any of this, for it all happens off-stage and it is left to the tight-lipped Dench character to remind her daughter of it, thereby hoping to shame the latter into cutting off all contact with her disgraceful husband. The daughter, however, shakes her head: “You are talking about facts,” she says, “not truth.”

So why does she remain ever faithful to her faithless husband, visiting him in prison and petitioning for his release? Because, she maintains, it is the duty of a good wife to obey her husband and the greater his transgressions, the greater is her wifely devotion tested. “If my husband’s sins have exceeded the limits,” she tells her mother, “then my devotion must exceed them too.” It’s a case of all or nothing.

This is Dench’s long-awaited return to the London stage following many on-screen award- winning successes, including the part of M in recent James Bond films (a powerful role originally written for a man). She plays the charachter, who brings Bond back into line on more than one occasion, with an icy precision that is just occasionally tinged with compassion for a battered, bruised and bloody, though still immaculate, Bond.

Dench’s career to date has been long and brilliant. Playing opposite Irish actor Norman Rodway, she won best newcomer for her part as a young isolated mother in the 1965 film, Four in the Morning. Then 31, she is now 74 and a dame of the British empire.

In Madame de Sade, Mishima sets out his stall early, with Dench's character behaving as any mother might when faced with an errant daughter, cajoling and denouncing in equal measure. As the play progresses, however, it shifts gear when the daughter reveals that the marriage was engineered by her ambitious mother, who was eager to shoehorn her daughter into the French aristocracy.

Armed with this information, we start to appreciate how the daughter, straining to be free of the stifling conventions of the bourgeoisie, sees in de Sade someone who has broken all society’s rules but who himself remains unbroken, despite repeated incarcerations and his mother-in-law’s machinations.

But it is in the arguments that racket to and fro between mother and daughter, with de Sade the invisible ringmaster, that engage the mind. The daughter castigates her mother for her smug compartmentalising of people: “Handkerchiefs in one drawer, gloves in another,” she says, “ . . . sweetness belongs to rabbits, vileness to toads . . . the world is filled with people [like you] who despise what they cannot imagine.”

In the final stages of the play, Dench’s character does a complete volte face. She opportunistically urges her daughter to stick by de Sade because now that the revolution has taken place, he, an iconoclastic aristocratic, will be a useful ally.

As a scandalous existentialist, de Sade has a lot in common with Sid Vicious, Joe Orton and, dare I say it, Oscar Wilde, and indeed with Mishima himself. Few Japanese will talk about Mishima (whose real name was Kimitake Hiraoka). Raised by a domineering grandmother, he was removed from his mother at birth and only returned to her for breastfeeding sessions. Until the age of 12 he was raised in an all-female household and spent the rest of his life seeking expressions of masculinity in the form of leather clothes, pseudo-military company and the cultivation of martial arts.

In 1970, at the age of 45, married and with three children, and having recently completed a tetralogy he had been working on, he committed seppuku, a form of self-administered ritual disembowelment, the final act of which required a designated companion to behead him. The companion, unable to do this, passed the task on to another acolyte, who did what was required before himself committing hari kiri.

London critics have been puzzled by Dench’s choice of play for not only does its rhetorical style make it difficult to act, the costumes and their accompanying wigs (Marie Antoinette meets Little Bo Peep) seem faintly ridiculous. However, the job opportunities for older women are few and far between and when asked if there is any role she would still like to play, Dench replied: “I’ve no idea. I know I just want to keep on working.” In that reply may lie the answer to the critics’ bemusement.

Madame de Sade is at Wyndhams Theatre, Charing Cross Road, London, until May 23