'jerusalem' by jez butterworth (w. mark rylance)

JERWOOD THEATRE DOWNSTAIRS

The Royal Court Theatre presents...

Jerusalem

Written by Jez Butterworth

10 Jul - 15 Aug

"My dad said he jumped buses. Horseboxes. Jumped an aqueduct once. He was gonna jump Stonehenge but the council put a stop to it."

On St George's Day, the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron, local waster and modern day Pied Piper, is a wanted man. The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his children want their dad to take them to the fair, Troy Whitworth wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.

Jez Butterworth's new play is a comic, contemporary vision of life in our green and pleasant land. His previous plays for the Royal Court include The Winterling, The Night Heron andMojo.

Director Ian Rickson
Designer Ultz
Lighting Mimi Jordan Sherin
Sound Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Composer Stephen Warbeck

Cast includes Jessica Barden, Tom Brooke, Greg Burridge, Lewis Coppen, Mackenzie Crook, Alan David, Aimeé-Ffion Edwards, Lenny Harvey, Gerard Horan, Danny Kirrane, Charlotte Mills, Lucy Montgomery, Sarah Moyle, Dan Poole, Harvey Robinson, Mark Rylance, Barry Sloane

Running time 3hrs 10mins approx, including 2 intervals

We walk in to see a fire curtain showing a faded grubby St George's cross.

A strip of real park turf along the front littered with beer cars Vodka bottles and plastic bags. A couple of stumps - an empty beer glass on one - and a tin water tank.

Or the left a pile of firewood - its neatness in incongruous contrast to the dirty mess around it. and beside it an abandoned old car seat

Vaughan Williams’ 'The Lark Ascending' swells and soars.

The smell of smoke.

15 year old Phaedre comes on dressed as a fairy and sings 2 verses of Jerusalem before being drowned out by loud pounding rock music

The Curtain rises on a party in full swing seen through strobe lighting.

Blackout

Lights up bright on two community liaison officers official in safety yellow waistcoats surveying the debris and then serving eviction notice from the Council on Rooster and his old silver metal Waterloo caravan. This despite the amplified dog noises Rooster is yelling through his loud hailer

From the first moment of his entrance we are held mesmerised watching him cast his spells over his court of motley youngsters left over from the party - and Ginger who has managed to miss it -and then the locals who are pulled in to his rubbishy drug & alcohol banked camp: the local professor who will wander through and enjoy the Fair day in their company tripping on the acid tabs they've slipped him; the landlord of Cooper 's pub festooned in full Morris Dancer bells and handkerchiefs for the village Fair and who needs to get high for the day to do it; the local bully boy looking for his missing daughter - the 15yr old Phaedre - and promising violence when he finds her.

And Rooster drinks and charms and swaggers and spins his yarns and weaves his magic on us all.

The second act reminds even move of a modern day Falstaff, enveloping his followers with tales of daring and fairytale and drugs and alcohol.

Then the arrival of a little boy Markey - Rooster's son - in place of the giant that might have been summoned by the drum - and his mother who is still caught in her appetite for Rooster and for his whizz despite now having a new man waiting.

Then the third act with the inevitable ostracising and street justice for Rooster before he is left to meet the official justice of the evicting bulldozer, bloodied, branded but defiantly unbowed.

The girls are vacuous and more thinly drawn than the boys and this is very much a play about men with no interest in the women beyond their relations with the main man Rooster and sometimes to other men. Ah me, it was ever thus but this is a frustrating weakness in a play called 'Jerusalem' and aspiring to give us an updated portrayal of England's pleasant pastures green turned unholy in small town small scale corruption. And while it is very funny, a number of the laughs sounded brutal to me - more the collusion of a mob at an easy weakling than the delighted sparkle of sprung enlightenment.

There is nothing especially new in this story. But it's enormous charisma and potency comes from the writing and performance of Johnny "Rooster" Byron. Mark Rylance shows us a man who is mesmerising complex funny frightened fantastical and fierce. He is Falstaff in all his vainglorious boasting, he is Don Juan purring the women into helpless devotion, he is Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the misunderstood outsider, the sensitive friend, the disgusting drunk, the mischievous prankster, the amoral dealer and the brawling thug.

And throughout this three+ hours the balance is held dangerously tight between a recognisably malevolent reality of small town low life and an heroic poetic sweep of the noble epic - pitching the misunderstood and much maligned hero against a world of contemporary monsters.

Great theatre.

So long as you don’t care about the invisibility of the women.

'Kursk' (Sound&Fury) @ Young Vic

A Young Vic and Fuel co-production, Sound&Fury's

Kursk

In collaboration with Bryony Lavery   

Commissioned by the Junction, Cambridge

3 June - 27 June 2009

A powerful  theatrical experience inspired by the Russian submarine disaster of August 2000.

A submarine is on patrol in the arctic. The crew sleep, eat, drill, long for word from home, and silently shadow their target. Their lives, at once extraordinary and mundane, are shattered by a global crisis from which uniquely personal stories emerge.

Cutting edge theatre company Sound&Fury (The Watery Part of the World) join Bryony Lavery (Frozen) to imagine the life of submariners, deep below the icy seas on the fraying front line of the cold war.

http://www.soundandfury.org.uk/

We walk in upstairs on to a metal walkway galley, looking down into low-light submarine spaces on raised platforms - (easily recognisable from films) - the technology of the bridge, the glowing screens of the control room, the captain's office, the mess, the head with a shower room and bunks. We have the choice of staying up and looking down on the action, or going down to experience it inside the space: after exploring downstairs we make the happy choice to watch from above and so avoid any of the claustrophobia panics i was steeling myself for.

We get a clearly told mostly unembellished telling of the sinking of the Kursk, Russia's state-of-the-art 21st century submarine from the viewpoint of a spying british sub crew who photograph her moments before the explosion that quickly sinks her. The secrecy of their presence prevents the captain from making any rescue attempt that would potentially set off an international furore. Inside this are the routines of submarine seamanship and the human back-stories of the crewmen.

There is much right with this show and it is pretty successful in its aim to avoid sensationalising the story - for me it was still over-acted and would have easily sustained a more neutral restrained portrayal of the men. This is banality made super-engaging because of the atmospheric danger of the space and the inherent suspense building out of the narrative of the mission. In fact the star of this show is the submarine environment and at every level: visually it is an easy leap of faith to believe we are inside the submarine; kinaesthetically we traded down a bit exchanging cramped and crowded disorientation for the air, distance and comfort of our upstairs position, which gave me the enjoyment of immersion simultaneously with awareness of being in a theatre. But it is the sound we are here for and the sonic dimension is the one that magics the space beyond the literal. I would have liked even more amplification to charge this up into an even more felt experience even at the expense of the accuracy Sound&Fury were wanting, and i would have liked a more constant sound so that even the silences were filled with the noise of submarine existence. But beyond these niggles there are some wonderful experiences inside this show. The atmospheric sounds are utterly convincing (to someone who can only imagine what a submarine is like from films) as are the dynamic sounds like the search (periscope) that we're pretty sure are on a soundscape the actors have had to learn to perform on cue to. The women's voices of wives and girlfriends arriving through the familygrams are scored together as music that counterpoints with the pop music loudspeakered into their before they are forced into stealth mission silence. It is the sounds that create the imagined real sense of the dives, the crash into a stray ship container, and the spooky threat of the unidentifiable tapping noise. All good and makes for highly believable and engaging docu-drama. The moments of exceptional experience come when the sounds are given centre stage: in a nearly complete blackout we hear sounds of water in an echoing chamber, people struggling to breathe, russian men talking - the sounds of the Kursk crewmen dying puts us inside this moment with them, first the emotions catch and tumble, then the mind whirls and stumbles, the breathing starts to race and just as I am feeling the panic of a breaching collision of sensations the lights return and the moment is left as an imprint. We could easily and potently sustained some time here in our own heads, watching the men routinely carry out their duties in a mute overlay of all that's been stopped in the Kursk. But the story in our sub continues and we are forced to surface to attend to the more immediate specifics of one man's tragedy - and in this we are given the space to bring our own sense in to mix with what we are watching.

This is a good show for us, and ready to be an exceptional one if it can have more development (although the men of Sound&Fury seem busy busy with other projects) now that its first five years of making have solved the problems of sightlines, design, soundscape and narrative accuracy. Waiting to be found now is the fine-tuning in the balance between elements to transcend a damn good docu-drama into a heightened theatre experience. For me the next work would be to tune down the acting into greyer performances, which the show can easily support, and tune up the sonics to make a more visceral experience.

Unless, of course, this is what the audience downstairs in the main submarine spaces are getting already, and we lost by swapping the intensity of being inside the story with the men for easier and more removed watching from above and outside? 

Sound & Fury is directed by Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner and Dan Jones. It draws on the disciplines of theatre, Foley artistry, sound design, music and storytelling. Its key artistic interest is in developing the sound space of theatre and presenting new ways of experiencing theatre and stories by heightening the aural sense. To achieve these aims, Sound & Fury has, in the past, boldly immersed its audience in total darkness. This unique theatrical device combined with sophisticated surround sound design, imaginative acoustic devices, voice and subtle lighting effects creates a powerful new language for theatre which has gained the attention and interest of the media, critics and - most importantly - a new audience. Their work has been twice selected for an Arts Council UK tour billed as the future of British theatre and has been included by the British Council in its group of touring companies. The Guardian has described their performance style as: “Total theatre that doesn't just happen all around you, but that swallows you up completely ... you feel as if you are experiencing the whole thing through your skin.”

 

From The Times

June 1, 2009

Theatrical realism in Kursk

The sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk has inspired a bold experiment in theatrical realism

 

Jasper Rees

Theatre is capable of taking its audience more or less anywhere merely through word and action and the odd prop. Even for the most imagination-stretching of art forms, however, life on board a submarine might be deemed a bridge too far. It’s been memorably done on film — the one that submariners all swear by is Das Boot rather than The Hunt for Red October. But how can theatre fully convey the cabin fever, the mental bends, the chronic uncertainty of the submerged life at sea?

Audiences for a new play at the Young Vic will be taking what is perhaps the first, and certainly the most realistic, theatrical dive to the ocean depths. Kursk takes place in the Maria, the box-like studio space where, as closely as possible, the interior of a hunter-killer submarine has been replicated in pipes, platforms, wires and blinking lights. Authenticity will be conveyed above all in the disembodied roar and hiss, growls and grunts both made and heard by the gigantic listening device that is a sub.

The title of the play gives at least some of the story away. It tells of the horrific death in 2000 of 118 Russian seamen aboard a stricken nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. The majority of them died soon after an on-board explosion, but 23 survived in an airtight part of the cabin for several days while President Putin refused to let Nato come to the rescue.

The argument of the play is that Nato was very much in a position to help. The Russian Navy was testing new weapons systems and showing them off to the Chinese. At least two US submarines are known to have been watching closely. The supposition of Kursk is that a British submarine is also in the neighbourhood, and it is the one that picks up the aural evidence of distress. But as its commander of this sub (on which the play is set) says: “We’re an attack vessel, not a f***ing lifeboat.”

Kursk is a collaboration between the theatre company Sound & Fury, which specialises in surround-sound designs of cinematic scope, and the playwright Bryony Lavery. They were first teamed four years ago by a funding initiative that pairs young companies with established writers. Staging a submarine drama appealed to all. For Lavery the lure was “the claustrophobia of the space”. For Dan Jones, of Sound & Fury, it was putting on stage “the extraordinary mind game of submarining combined with the absurdity of the submariner’s domestic life: making tea alongside a nuclear reactor”.

For a while they toyed with setting the drama on the Kursk itself. The most bizarre ideas for realising the human tragedy were tested and discarded: the Kursk as a nightmare vision of Chekhovian stasis; the disaster as dramatised by clowns. “It became clear that normal life at sea is so extraordinary,” explains Mark Espiner, of Sound & Fury, “that we were going to miss a trick if we didn’t actually use that as a benchmark against which to set the disaster. There was the potential for voyeurism. Also, how are you ever actually going to get the idea of what the last 23 survivors of the Kursk were dealing with?”

Had a wackier idea prevailed, it’s very unlikely that the production would have had such enthusiastic support from the Royal Navy. Among the play’s consultants is the chairman of the international submariners association, who happened to meet the Kursk’s crew in St Petersburg not long before she sailed. A former Polaris commander who now runs the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport also advised, as did an ex-coxswain who was serving at the time of the disaster.

One adviser even ended up in the cast. Ian Ashpitel is a submariner turned actor who to this day lists reading Morse code at 25 words a minute on his CV. As a radio operator on a submarine at the height of the Cold War, he is full of tales of every hue: from breaking through the ice to play cricket at the North Pole to sneaking into Murmansk harbour to spy on a new Soviet aircraft carrier from ten metres under its keel. It may seem a strange career leap, but not to Ashpitel. “You don’t see daylight for 12 weeks and start doing things like putting raincoats on and umbrellas up, pretending it’s a rainy day. ‘Morning, terrible weather.’ Silly stuff. Watching TV programmes that aren’t there.” So it was but a step into the rehearsal room.

As part of their preparation, a visit to HMS Devonport was laid on. Jones took along his microphone to capture authentic sounds, while the five actors had a go on a simulator that fakes the sensation of a 60 degree dive. They also went aboard a real sub to get a feel for the actual cramped space. “It was like the first time you go to New York,” Lavery says. “You’ve seen it on film. It’s strangely alike but completely different”. For Ashpitel it was an unwelcome trip down memory lane. “I hadn’t been down one for 28 years and after ten minutes I thought: ‘I’ve got to get out of here’.”

The idea is to reproduce that oppressive intimacy. It’s a promenade production, so the audience will be able to wander under the conning tower and loiter outside the karzi. By coincidence, a full house will tally numerically with the hundred-plus seamen aboard a nuclear sub. Naturally there’s no interval. It will be a unique mark of the play’s success if by the end they are all desperate to get out.

Kursk previews at the Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7922 7922), from Wed and opens on June 8

 

jude law as 'hamlet' - donmar west end at wyndam's

Creative Team

Director: Michael Grandage
Designer: Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer: Neil Austin
Composer & Sound Designer: Adam Cork

Hamlet: Jude Law

Polonius: Ron Cook

Claudius: Kevin R. McNally

Gertrude: Penelope Wilton

 

 

very still & clean & clear putting all emphasis on language

jude law's Hamlet works as a character easy to feel sympathy with as he processes through depression ~ denial ~ fury ~ impetuous tenderness with his mother ~ to cool well-bred alpha-mastery. He is always credible but never dangerous.

 

Fresh insight comes in the 'get thee to nunnery'' scene when it suddenly seems obvious that he is saying to Ophelia everything he has repressed saying to his mother, and this makes his avowed love for Ophelia at her graveside more believable than usual.

 

Ron Cook's Polonius is fine. Penelope Wilton's Gertrude manages to shine through her horrible business woman's woman's suit costume. Kevin R. McNally's Claudius too is crafted with sureness. Sadly the younger leads are all thin, and most ruinously thin vocally. Ophelia's mad scene was too pretty and much much too prettily sung (Tara Fitzgerald is still the only actor i have been convinced by in this scene).

 

There is no ambiguity and no emotional force in this version and I drifted out a number of times - not so much from boredom as through distraction: the fullest experience this show gave me came from Shakespeare's words, here are given a full invigoration so that the vitality of the words and the images they conjure combined with the wide openness of the  space design and the held still energy and focus in the performances kept making a head full of rich imaginings that took me away from what was happening on stage.  

 

And what emerges above all else is the apparent straight-forwardness of Hamlet - the character makes perfect sense and it is hard after watching this show to remember why or how countless essays have been written about his bewildering complexities. In this end this reduces the play to a series of stills and a more prosaic domestic drama than it should be. 

i will go back and watch again peter brook's 'hamlet' with adrian lester and try and figure out why the held energy in this startles and vibrates even out of the screen, whereas the apparently same kind of energy in this production arrives clear and fully formed and then evaporates almost without trace...

 

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso - Romeo Castellucci

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

Romeo Castellucci

Societas Raffaello Sanzio

http://www.raffaellosanzio.org/

Spill Festival 2009

http://www.spillfestival.com/index.php?plid=4

at Barbican Theatre

Presented as three separate events – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, Romeo Castellucci has dismantled, exposed and transformed Dante’s epic text into a truly lived experience.
Using a profoundly visual style, Castellucci creates a deeply unsettling world forcing you into a hauntingly beautiful nightmare, engaging all your senses in an experience you are unlikely to forget. This is highly visceral theatre, full of provocative experiences not for the faint-hearted.

Inferno traditionally tells the epic tale of a struggle between heaven and hell, between God and the devil and between the living and the dead. Castellucci transports this story to the here and now, placing into question the future of humanity.

Depicting images of family life, Purgatorio is uncomfortably set in a fraught domestic space where the use of vivid imagination protects against a tormenting reality.
In an intimate installation, Paradiso creates the ultimate frame where small groups of viewers are sent on a journey to try and find paradise.

Credits:
Direction, set design, lighting and costumes by Romeo Castellucci
Original music by Scott Gibbons
Choreography by Cindy Van Acker and Romeo Castellucci

The work of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered by artists and audiences worldwide to be highly influential in contemporary performance. Having created a new non-narrative theatre, a visual language that directly challenges traditional forms, Castellucci’s visionary work is uncompromising and always surprising. Making impressive large-scale work that questions our entire human condition, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso has a company of over 60.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has previously been presented in London as part of LIFT; Tragedia Endogonidia at Laban (2004), Genesi at Sadler’s Wells (2001) and Giulio Cesare at Southbank Centre (1999), also at Battersea Arts Centre withBuchettino (2001).

Having been performed as part of the Festival D’Avignon 2008, this is the UK premiere of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (bite09 SPILL Festival of Performance) and one of the few opportunities to see the complete trilogy performed together.

Inferno

"Inferno" with each of these digits displayed back-to-front 

gatewaying out to us: it is us who are in this hell. each united 

letter is spluttering white light and soundscape of electrical 

shorting and buzzing is loud and abrasive.

throughout this piece the sound provides its centre moving 

through dangerous electrical sounds and loud noises of 

violence to choral sweetness.

one by one each of the "Inferno" units are removed leaving 

only the framing " " which remain for the duration at each 

side of the stage.

Romeo Castellucci comes on stage, announces who he is 

and is dressed in protective soft armour as eight large 

alsatian dogs are brought on and and chained across the 

front of the stage. loud barking offstage and by the dogs 

in front of us. one by one three dogs run on to the stage 

an attack Romeo, holding on to him. we have to take the 

image of aggression and animal attack while filtering out 

the happy tail wagging by the dogs.

a large black cube slowing arrives in the centre of the stage, 

a huge black sail billowing above it. the black drapes are 

pulled up to reveal a cubed crèche of toddlers happily encased 

and playing.

Andy Warhol walks slowly on with a polaroid, takes a picture of 

us, turns to look at the children, turns back to us and slowly 

falls in on himself.

The children are re-covered and removed, a shiny skull is left 

behind which Andy Warhol takes and places beneath a huge 

mirrored swinging wall, which lowers slowly on to break it like 

a nut.

A boy with a basketball, each bounce amplified to terrifying 

sounds, a sense of something else behind him

A great sea of people with their different coloured clothes 

slowly pout across the stage, fall down and wash as one 

mass backwards while differently aged individuals step 

forward to hold the ball replacing the boy at the front. the 

final older woman appears to greedily eat the ball 

accompanied by sickening sounds of gluttonous eating.

And so it drifts through a series of images, always slowed 

and certain and seemingly endless: 

a series of loving tableaux replaced later by a series of 

mimed throat slashings, the slow climb one by one on to 

the returned black cube, then the arms spread wide in 

some sort of universal supplication only to fall backwards, 

again and again, backgrounded by a projected list of 

Andy Warhol's works with their dates, a back projection 

of the names of deceased members of Societas that 

seemed sentimentally discordant with the rest of the piece, 

a grand piano is set alight and we watch it burn

a white horse the arrives as the sea of people are rewound 

slowly back from whence they came to then be poured 

over with vivid red blood.

and then the return of Andy Warhol to take another 

polaroid of us and then to disappear into the wreck of 

a smashed car.

somehow while it is all interesting enough the 

accumulative effect is of a scenographic hypermarket 

with the chance to view what's hot in this season's range 

- a bit too look at me look at me. but a treat for all 

that to get theatre this different from our more 

usual literary plays...

Purgatorio

Paradiso

after a long queue we are let in to the space to see a huge 

dazzlingly white cube structure, a small entrance in one 

corner into another smaller white light cubed space, 

around black hole entrance into darkness. inside this final 

space is first the sound of falling water and as eyes adjust 

we can see we are in a larger black space with a waterfall 

cascading down the back wall. there are other sounds too 

and looking up we see the naked upper torso of a man at 

the top of the waterfall apparently struggling - to free 

himself? to communicate? - evidently unhappy and caught 

in this perpetuity, and yet dangerously precarious suspended 

above this black waterfall: misery in his stuckedness but were 

he to get himself free the drop would destroy him. 

this is an apparently small piece but absolutely perfectly formed 

- the fusion of image and sound burn a permanent imprint so 

that - unusually for me - i can still easily re-summon up the 

remembered pictures days afterwards. this is a vision of life 

ever after that is oppressive in its small stuck foreverness, 

somehow all the more plausible for its absence of fire and 

brimstone or colour and movement. a superbly realised perhaps 

even heightened by our having to make a special trip to the 

barbican and queue for some time for this 5minute moment.

'madame de sade'

Comtesse de Saint-Fond ~~~~~~~ Frances Barber

Baronesse de Simaine ~~~~~~~~~ Deborah Findlay

Charlotte ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jenny Galloway

Madame de Montreuil ~~~~~~~~~ Judi Dench

Anne ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fiona Button

Renee, Madame de Sade ~~~~~~~ Rosamund Pike

Director ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Michale Grandage

Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Christopher Oram

Lighting Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~ Neil Austin

Composer & Sound Designer ~~~~ Adam Cork

Video Art & Projection Designer ~ Lorna Heavy

Act I

1772 The salon in Madame de Montreuil's house. Autumn.

Act 2

1778 The same. September.

Act 3

1790 The same. April, nine months sonce the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A difficult play - intellectual in its preponderance of words, ideas, argument - and wonderful for this, and for bringing us something non-naturalistic and this good in the west end. Annoying that a lot of the critics seem incapable of reviewing the actual piece rather than trotting out their different lists of what theatre should be as if a) their tastes are that authoritative and b) that theatre should be just one thing. (e.g. Susannah Clapp’s requirement for ‘fast pace’, and ‘women to be like women’ whatever that might mean.)

So this is an expressionist piece much closer to Brechtian theatre than the usual naturalistic fare. Played against an opulent gold-walled salon that shines and reflects wealth and purposelessness
Lighting, colours (browns to greens to icy metallic blues) and projections are used expressionistically. Played out between six articulate certain women who all arrive in impossibly ornate and heavy architectural concoctions to position themselves to present their views of the matter and who all easily breach the confines of their character types.

The women arrive and place themselves and are mostly still - Frances Barber's character getting the only real action from her whip play. All are strong and full in their characters, and listening to them reason and debate their different certainties from such fine actors who all bring such total presence makes the show compelling. And the substance of the piece is made stark and unremitting by the absolute absence of editorial comment - there are no easy indulgences of knowing who or what is right or wrong here: hear the arguments and make up your own mind. Listening to what is said in the onslaught of words is as problematic as the Marquis de Sade himself - overly ornamental sex & violations or philosophical testings on the nature of devotion? The inevitable decay of an aristocracy redolent with its own pointlessness or a new libertarian emancipation? Salacious gossip-mongering or high-minded argument?

This is a show of dense & relentless words counterbalanced by performances of crystal clarity and vibrating stillness masquerading as a richly made flummery of period opulence.

Mishima apparently wanted to make something that showed 'fire through ice', and to a greater extent this is what we get: the burning passions and pulsations of craving control are in every case perfectly glazed in icy stillness and religiously constructed manners.

And difficult in a personal sense perhaps in its investigation of a woman under the ruinous spell of a potently toxic man, not unlike a woman I know. And actually in this case (too?) it turns out not to be him she is so fettered to, but her own construction of him as a symbol of holiness which his actual presence could only shatter ...

cf. Chrstopher Harts's Sunday Times review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article5934217.ece

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/MadameDeSade?authkey=Gv1sRgCKr55vPEm6WJqgE#