Lewd, lascivious, lecherous, love . . . all the best words begin with 'L'. This is something the Marquis de Sade knows very well, and Doug Wright's Quills is a play that attempts to get underneath his image as verbose, perverse pornographer extraordinaire.
The setting is Napoleonic-era France, and the disgraced aristocrat de Sade (Max Hoehn) is languishing in an asylum. Known throughout France for his seedy sexual mores, he is spending his time fashioning himself into a giant of morally, and literarily dubious stories and novels. He soon forms troubling relationships with some of the asylum's staff, including a repressed holy man, the Abbe du Coulmier (Alex Bowles) and a young laundress, Madeline (Natasha Kirk). However the entrance of a new medical head, Dr Royer-Collard (Tom van der Klugt), who intends to deal with De Sade in his own uncompromising way, disturbs this otherwise filthy idyll.
Like the Marquis himself, this is a play that flirts with extremes. The first half, for example, oscillates between long passages of the most depraved, and absolutely hilarious, vulgarity, and, conversely, monologues of great depth, and sometimes, great pretension. The monologues concern themselves with the nature of morals, of censorship, freedom of speech and self-expression, while the vulgarity concerns itself with things that will probably be deemed unprintable in this paper. It works because it is so well written. Although it does paint very broad strokes to blend all the proceedings together, the discussions it raises more than make up for the occasional simplification of their articulation.
Max Hoehn delivers it all with a quite arresting central performance as de Sade. Although it is painfully obvious that some of the disrobing that happens predominantly in the second half does not come naturally to this otherwise naturally gifted performer, he is truly something.
He's ably supported by the rest of the cast, a particular standout being Tom van der Klugt, as the doctor. While certainly not a play to take your elderly mother to see, Quills transcends the filthy and the fury, and works equally well as a bawdy comedy as well as a chin-scratching think-piece about what drives us to do the things we love the most. It runs at the OFS until Saturday evening.
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