It is exactly twenty-five years since Christopher Hampton first adapted Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses – then a little-known novel – for the stage. ‘It’ll never work,’ they said. ‘It’s a novel full of letters; they never meet each other.’ With the bloody-mindedness of genius, Hampton persisted. Alan Rickman played the Vicomte de Valmont, and Lindsay Duncan the Marquise de Merteuil, and the play’s success hurled it from the West End to Broadway.
The script is brilliant, chilling and amoral – no, immoral, for the central characters actively flout morality as the most unforgivably boorish of commonplaces. Valmont and Merteuil were once lovers, and now the world exists only as a chessboard for their skirmishes. Pride is paramount, but unflinching control comes a close second. Merteuil has been slighted by her recent conquest Monsieur de Gercourt, who has become engaged to a demure fifteen year-old still blinking in the sunlight after her convent education. She avenges herself by having Valmont seduce Gercourt’s naive fiancee, in exchange for a night in her own bed. Meanwhile Valmont has resolved to scale Mme de Tourvel, a married lady of the highest repute for virtue and beauty and a philanderer’s Mount Everest.
Rachel Bull’s cast do a very fair justice to this adaptation. Merteuil and Valmont drive the performance. Chloe Courtney must be a contender for actress of the term as she plays Merteuil with an assured economy and lightness of touch. Quiet, almost ethereal, she spikes her gentle demeanour with shards of jagged malice. Lines such as ‘a poor choice is less dangerous than an obvious choice’ suggest some commonplace Wildean termagant, but Courtney sidesteps the cliches neatly. She delivers Merteuil’s inexhaustible quiver of aphorisms with barbed menace and subtle poison. The French have a word for this kind of performance: sangfroid.
Alex Krasodomski-Jones, meanwhile, has torn up Alan Rickman’s textbook on Valmont and plumped for a much softer interpretation. Once again the obvious thing to do with Valmont would have been to play him as a swaggering rake burning testosterone like rocket fuel, the kind of man who would speak of ‘the real intoxication when you know she loves you, but you’re not quite certain of victory’ over a brandy-and-soda. There is none of this ostentatious manfulness in Krasodomski-Jones’ Valmont, though – he is fey, flimsy, a little sleepy. You might even go so far as to call him effeminate. This makes for a sensitive counterpoint to Courtney’s Merteuil, and the dynamic between the two is tense and compelling. Their ‘single combat’ is fenced out with chilled steel and icy flair.
The rest of the characters are not touched by the same stardust as the principals. Charlie Mulliner mars an otherwise convincing performance as de Tourvel with a bit too much bosom-heaving. Danceny – the fifteen year-old Cecile’s lover – and Mme de Rosemonde, Valmont’s aunt, are very credible, but some of the other actors look a little uncomfortable. It’s no big deal, though: it actually helps the play along if the characters duped by Merteuil and Valmont are somehow not quite real. My only concern for this play is that it might be a bit spoiled by the microphones and other paraphernalia of an open-air performance, when it would really benefit from the immediacy of a theatre like the BT.
Dangerous Liaisons is taut and poised. Watching this production, you feel that you are being treated to a ninety minute-long advert for some potent, high-class spirit. Absinthe, perhaps. Its cold-blooded depravity makes Dorian Gray look like the Little Prince. This is sexy, intelligent, elegant theatre, and if you only watch one garden play this term, make it this one.
