If you think a review’s job is to tell you whether or not to go and see a show, this one is almost entirely pointless. Only almost, because all advance tickets are sold out, but some are still available on the day. And anyway, I always say reviews are there to tell you what something’s like so you can make your own decision or simply be better informed. And the information on When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other is... well, it’s a question: what was all the fuss about?

For “fuss”, read “hype”. Ooh, Cate Blanchett... who’s not actually that much of a stranger to London stages, although this is her first appearance at the National Theatre. And ooh, OOH, she’s playing sado-masochistic sex games onstage! Well, kinda. Yes, there’s a bit of tying up and dominance/submission. Yes, there’s a bit of cross-dressing... although Blanchett in a dapper business suit doesn’t raise eyebrows nearly as high as her opposite number Stephen (Game Of Thrones) Dillane in a maid’s outfit. But the sensationalism plays distinct second fiddle to what it’s in aid of.

What that is, is a series of “variations” on Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela, which tells of a young housemaid being pursued, abducted and almost raped by her employer before her written account of her tribulations reforms him and the two fall in love and marry. But playwright Martin Crimp would never do anything as straightforward as an adaptation. Several scenes are noticeably riffing on moments from the novel, but by and large the connections are of the kind that Spitting Image used to credit as “From an original lunch...”.

It’s a series of sketches of power: real, consensually bestowed or imagined; personal, economic or sexual; physical, psychological or emotional. Matters grow more complex: there are scenes where Blanchett delivers her oppo’s lines and vice versa. It becomes a matter of controlling, not other people as such, but the narrative. Pamela was arguably the first true novel in the English language, and takes the form of a series of letters from Pamela to her parents, so on one level it’s really about how we actually tell a story. Crimp makes this more directly a duel between individuals, a kind of pervy verbal fencing match.

This being a Katie Mitchell production, the lighting is generally dim. It’s not often easy to penetrate the murk. The same can be said of the play as a whole. Blanchett and Dillane are more compelling than the material, which seems more concerned with displaying its own thoughtfulness than with actually taking those thoughts anywhere identifiable. In the end it’s more intricate, and much more articulate, but not necessarily any more profound, than Fifty Shades.

Written for The Lady.