What to say about ... Judi Dench in Madame de Sade

The Marquis de Sade, you declare, is the thinking person's pornographer. His inventive methods of sexual gratification and writings thereon have whipped many literary figures into celebrating him as a libertine, a transgressive and a revolutionary. The fact that Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Carter have both defended de Sade would seem reason enough for you to consider him a free-thinking feminist. So Yukio Mishima's play, which places the sadist offstage and looks at his ideas through the eyes of the women around him, has – of course – captured your interest.

You were unaccountably prevented from catching Ingmar Bergman's New York production, performed in Swedish in 1995, but your theatregoing coterie won't be able to slip you up if you reminisce fondly about it with a little help from the Telegraph. Michael Grandage's Donmar production is the first proper British staging of Mishima's play. Why not swipe Grandage's own suggestion that, on some levels, Madame de Sade is high-class, 18th-century porn, and that "the audience will not have seen anything like this before: it will be like going to a new play".

Of course, you declare with a flourish worthy of Monsieur Whiplash himself, the director is wrong. The play's a dud: "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." The Times said that, but don't let on. Crack the whip even harder, taking your cue from the Guardian: the director's "impeccable taste" and judgment have "wobbled". While "the acting and staging are breathtaking," you observe, "the play itself is an example of the Higher Tosh".

It is, you think, a debate over three acts, in which the Marquis's wife (Rosamund Pike) loyally defends his punitive pleasures while her mother (Judi Dench) disapproves with conventional moralising and her sister works as his slave. What a family! And what can have incited Dame Judi Dench, you splutter, "to lend the production her enormous box-office appeal?" (Evening Standard) "They look like a row of powdered duchesses in a Paris mansion designed by Christopher Oram as a mottled, silver corridor of sense and sensibility," you say with colourful verve stolen from the Independent. Don't hesistate to gild the artistic lily: "[It] looks beautiful," you enthuse, "like a moving gallery of portraits by Joshua Reynolds."

And what poses! There's Dench, sporting "high, upstanding hair and gold-hued dresses that billow out as if there were a giant colander beneath" (Telegraph) and proving the "perfect embodiment of outraged propriety" (Guardian). Ultimately, says the Times, it's an "unrewarding part, since her task is to embody what Mishima himself summed up as Law, Society and Morality". Pique your pals' interest with a salacious touch, explaining how Pike's character has to "dangle from a chandelier while a boy licks off … blood and urine", but, just as they're about to keel over in shock, reveal that all this "occurs safely offstage". Finally, you can't resist a topical allusion borrowed from the Guardian: "the image of Josef Fritzl inevitably comes to mind" during the drama's "imprisoning experiments". And that's more disturbing than any play could be.

Do say: Hardcore yawn

Don't say: Hit me baby one more time

Reviews reviewed: An overlooked play, perhaps best overlooked.