Writers: Nicolás Perez Costa and Matias Puricelli
Director: Nicolás Perez Costa
The infamous French libertine, the Marquis de Sade, is noted for several reasons. His history of mixing the infliction of pain upon others with his own sexual desires gave us the term sadism, but beyond that, he was a prolific writer, producing works throughout his many periods of incarceration in various prisons and asylums.
Argentinian performer Nicolás Perez Costa, who has created this hour with cowriter Matias Puricelli, plays the Marquis dressed in a shocking pink tailcoat and breeches, evoking the 18th Century period in which the Marquis existed – but with no shirt underneath and the addition of a combination of straps and corsetry, this feels like a modern spin.
Initially, Costa, who has been writhing on a wooden bench as the audience troops in, presents a charming version of the Marquis as he joshes with the audience about the contents of a 100-year-old bottle of wine. But the addition of a shifty, stumbling presence (Hugo Coello) is part of a descent into something darker. Coello stands on a chair to mumble some readings and, after returning backstage, issues sounds of whipping. Whether the subject of the flagellation is himself or some unnamed person is not always clear; it happens more than once, though, so one could mentally imagine one or the other each time.
What it does seem to do is make Costa’s Marquis angry. Actually, nearly everything makes him angry, and sometimes he gets angry with no provocation at all. This is an hour that involves lots of shouting, and the Marquis running from side to side of the stage for some reason. Heavily accented mumblings from both performers do little to illuminate the thought processes behind events.
There is plenty of repetition, too. Sometimes this is used for comic effect, especially as the Marquis receives letter after letter from his wife, prompting the same negative response in him. Repetition is present, too, in the shifting dynamic between the Marquis and the man who appears to be his servant, a scene of prurient intimidation played out first with de Sade as tormentor, then as the tormentee.
On other occasions, the repetition is baffling. At one point, de Sade pulls onstage what he tells us is a woman’s dead body, wrapped in an expensive carpet, perhaps the victim of a sex game gone wrong. The carpet unfurls to reveal that the mass inside is a collection of the Marquis’ books. That is a striking image the first time we see it; the second, far less so, and little to no reasoning behind the repetition is evident.
Instead, we get more shouting, with some whispering and crying thrown in for relief, a gradual disrobing as the men torment each other with a shirt doused in cold water and wrung out. It becomes increasingly clear that this whole hour may be an impression of a delusional madness, that de Sade is imagining the whole exercise during one of his incarcerations in an asylum in later life.
The whole piece, though, is never really structured well enough to allow us in. The promotional blurb for Costa’s piece suggests that the audience “finds itself uncomfortably implicated”, but there is little opportunity for that.
Perhaps the most coherent thought in the whole hour is the Marquis’ assertion that sex relies on a perfect balance between pain and pleasure. Part of that coherence comes from the number of times the line is repeated, that’s true – but it remains a far more satisfactory distillation of the Marquis de Sade and his sexual appetite than anything else witnessed. It is a mix that one wishes would be more evident in this theatrical endeavour – one that is less pleasurable than it is just painful.
Reviewed on 16 April 2026
