[Review with mild spoilers.]
Though it soon played in bigger theatres after its hugely successful RSC debut at The Other Place in 1985, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's theatrical version of Pierre Choderlos des Laclos' scandal-provoking 1782 epistolary novel, is still usually regarded as a chamber drama best suited to small spaces.
With her new production in the Lyttelton, Marianne Elliott sets out to blow that idea out of the water. Boasting a monochrome mirrored set by Rosanna Vize, around which shadowy suited males prowl as the audience take their seats, and making dance a central component (choreography is by Tom Jackson Greaves), Elliott's take on the play is big, broad-strokes, balletic.
Indeed, following her quite colourless film debut The Salt Path, Elliott seems to have decided to go all-out in terms of theatricality here, with the characters' savage social/sexual warfare and interior struggles conveyed through movement as much as dialogue. The approach feels much more integrated than in Matthew Warchus' dance-heavy Oedipus at the Old Vic last year, though given the mix of cheers and grumblings in the audience reaction following the fourth preview, the expressionist result looks likely to be just as divisive. For me, though, this proved, overall, a highly entertaining evening, though not one without some flaws.
The production's tone of glittering camp is set from the first appearance of Lesley Manville's Marquise de Merteuil as a masked figure in scarlet striding into the ballroom, and marking out her latest prey: the convent-reared 15-year-old Cecile, whose premature seduction Merteuil is determined to bring about as a way of getting back at a lover who has jilted her. Central to Merteuil's plot is another previous lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, who is planning another seduction: that of the virtuous, married Madame de Tourvel.
Can the exploitative erotic power games of two nasty pre-Revolution French aristos have much to say to audiences today? Well, according to the programme what resonated in the 80s as a proto-portrait of "the 'me' generation" now works just as well as an exploration of the abuses undertaken by the powerful. Accordingly, costumes (by Natalie Roar, in a distinctive theatrical design debut) in Elliott's production mix periods - dress suits for the men and a series of sparkling red outfits (plus red-soled Louboutins!) for Manville; and the odd fetish flourish.
Actually, it's not necessary to force contemporary parallels to find the machinations of Merteuil and Valmont compelling, and Hampton's arch, epigrammatic dialogue still sounds quite good. But it's certainly notable that Elliott, as often, brings the female characters to the fore, whether Gabrielle Drake as Valmont's elderly aunt or Hannah van der Westhuysen's Cecile (tall and rangy like Uma Thurman in the Stephen Frears film of the play), even though the "feminism" of the piece still ends up seeming highly equivocal.
Maybe that focus accounts for the deficiencies of Aidan Turner as Valmont. If Alan Rickman was often described as "born to play the role", the same can't yet be said for Turner. Actually, the actor looks the part but seems to have been directed to frequently play for crowd-pleasing laughs, an approach that inevitably lowers the dramatic stakes.
Given his Poldark and Rivals form, it's no surprise that Turner gets a shirtless moment - though that's nothing compared to Manville's jaw-dropping display at the opening of the second half, an intimate scene designed to reveal Merteuil's private fears and vulnerabilities in a production which enhances the protagonists' age gap.
There's something so fascinatingly honed, immaculate and precise about Manville's stage acting: she achieves her effects without grandstanding of any kind. The economy, control, perceptiveness and wit she brings to the calculating Merteuil, along with her history with the play (she was Cecile in the original production and appeared in the 2022 TV version), makes all of her scenes highlights. Later, she brilliantly shows this self-described "virtuoso of deceit" being confronted by the limits of her power and the realisation that "life can be... frighteningly unpredictable."
The biggest surprise in the cast, though, is Monica Barbaro, who makes a superb stage debut as the ill-fated Madame de Tourvel. Barbaro did a a passable impression of folk's madonna Joan Baez in the very dull Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. She retains a madonna quality here too but her work is on another level of delicacy and intensity.
Tourvel's initial resistance to, gradual deep love for and then rejection by Valmont makes her the tragic heroine of the piece, and Barbaro pulls us into the character's conflicting emotions with subtlety and skill. Trained in dance, Barbaro is the protagonist of one of the show's most effective stylised, choreographed sequences, as Tourvel is seduced away from prayer by her thoughts of Valmont, externalised by the ministrations of the grasping dancers surrounding her.
With its masque and movement elements, and emphasis on exploitative schemes and treacheries, the Elliott production I was most reminded of here was her 2010 take on Women Beware Women - a title that would equally suit this play. Sometimes exhilarating, sometimes strained, this Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a similarly mixed bag in which subtle touches merge with scenes that default to obviousness. It's a shame the staging overdoes Tourvel's final moments, with an attempted operatic fever dream quality that isn't achieved - at least not yet.
But for me the production pulls of a bold, totally altered ending in which the mantle of manipulation and cruelty gets picked up by a member of the next generation - one who has, like Catherine Sloper in The Heiress, been "taught by masters."
The dance goes on...
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is booking at the National Theatre until 6 June, and will be filmed for NT Live. Further information here.
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