Isabelle Huppert’s last appearance on a London stage was in a bizarre theatrical collage billed as Phaedra(s). She returns to perform an adaptation of two stories by the Marquis de Sade, Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797), which turns into a debate between embodiments of humiliated virtue and exultant vice. There are few more expressive actors than Huppert but, having seen her perform in Paris in Shakespeare and Marivaux, I wish she would appear here in a classic play rather than performing, for one night only, a solo recital. Although standing at a lectern and reading the texts in French, with English surtitles above, Huppert does vigorously enact Sade’s two polarised siblings. Juliette is a worldly libertine who embraces pleasure, even when it involves cruelty and murder, and Huppert endows her with a mocking defiance and rejects conventional morality with a wealth of dismissive shrugs. In contrast, the convent-educated Justine maintains her piety even when being sodomised by monks or subjected to unspeakable torments by a rapacious forger; Huppert, with hands clasped in prayer or eyes imploringly raised to heaven, indicates the consolation of faith.
The problem lies with the texts themselves. Sade presents us with an artificial choice between two extremes, takes a gloating delight in torture and sanctions a form of social Darwinism in which the strong invariably triumph over the weak. He also dresses up pornography with a good deal of windy philosophising that led one recent translator, David Coward, to describe him as “the Great Unreadable”. He is not, however, unactable as Huppert proves. She structures the stories to present us with an argument between Juliette and Justine, and differentiates the characters physically and vocally as well as through lighting changes. Her Juliette is full of expansive gestures, not least when deriding God, and announces with voluptuous, deep-throated delight her worship of crime. As Justine, Huppert’s voice suddenly becomes lighter in texture and her movements more confined, as if subservient to a higher power. Even if listening to the words of Sade involves a good deal of pain, there is a compensatory pleasure in watching Huppert.
