Michael Grandage has proved he can turn just about any old play into gold, but last night Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade resisted even his director’s alchemy. It’s lead, gilded lead, highly decorated lead, but still lead. And that’s despite the hard work of Judi Dench, who has to be almost permanently outraged as the mother-in-law of the imprisoned Marquis de Sade, and Rosamund Pike, who can’t be blamed for resembling an earnest schoolgirl doggedly adjusting to larks in the dorm.

Dench in particular has an unrewarding part, since her task is to embody what Mishima himself summed up as Law, Society and Morality. This means she tries to get de Sade out of jail and then, learning that his excesses have extended to taking her younger daughter on a sexual spree to Venice, tries to ensure that he stays there. But Pike fares barely better, for her job is to represent Wifely Devotion, which means taking him food in prison and giving his orgies philosophical justification. True, she must also dangle from a chandelier while a boy licks off the blood and urine caused by a man with “a long, black whip like a swallow”, but that occurs safely offstage.

The conversations between Wifely Devotion and Law, Society and Morality have their intense moments, but they are static, self-consciously literary and pretty stilted, though in very different ways. The language can be clunky, as when Pike’s Renée tells her mother that her own breasts “haven’t the hypocritical shape imposed by the conventions and by conformity with the world”. And though Grandage has cut the most florid metaphors, it can be precious. Fancy having to compare de Sade to a worker-bee bringing “the honey of tenderness to the cool, dark nest where I am waiting”; but that’s poor Pike’s lot.

The marquis doesn’t appear, but we meet Carnal Desire in the form of a wonderfully sensuous Frances Barber, who has a tale to tell about being an altar in a Black Mass, and Deborah Findlay as a flummoxed Religion. And there’s reason for her, you and me to be flummoxed, given Mishima’s strenuous if not-unfamiliar attempts to argue that sweetness and cruelty, pain and pleasure, good and evil are essentially one.

Again and again I felt I was hearing the Mishima who liked to pose for the camera as St Sebastian, was photographed with a hatchet jutting from his head, and ended up ritually disembowelling himself. There’s something creepy about his fascination with sadism and masochism — and something very creepy about Madame de Sade.

Box office: 0844 4825120 to May 23

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