Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions.
It was always kind of trashy, mind, and in a post-#MeToo world I’d say there are some fairly hard questions to be asked about its titillating realpolitik.
Accepting all that, this is a pretty damn good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner.
The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose former relationship has degenerated into callous game playing.
Manville is of course an absurdly good actor, one of the all time greats, and Turner is really not bloody bad either. In the sexy, sinister, mirror-filled world conjured by Rosanna Vize’s set and Tom Jackson Greaves’ whirling choreography – filled with silent, glowering courtiers who dance with menacing elegance – the two leads are the main attraction and rightly so. The play has issues but by god do they work it, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect.
Manville’s Merteuil is sexy but not overtly sensuous. Rather, she is cerebral, an expert court manipulator, a spider sitting at the heart of an intricate web of intrigues, ready to pull people's lives apart for oft-obscure reasons. Casting a slightly older actor in the role really clarifies Merteuil I think, emphasising her senior aristocrat, survivor status. She isn’t the queen bee purely because she’s more evil than everyone else in the degenerate French court – it’s because she is tougher, smarter, savvier and has lasted longer.
Before he arrives on stage, Valmont is described as some sort of callous, vengeful monster who takes delight in ruining women and lives. Fascinatingly, that’s not who Turner gives us. His lounge lizardy Valmont is a creature of pure instinct, a sleekly horny puppy whose desire to bang every woman in sight comes less from a place of cruel coercion and more because he is genuinely hot for all of them and simply has no ethics or morals telling him to restrain himself. But on the whole this is not because he’s a total bastard, but because he actually has a childish, id-driven simplicity that doesn’t make room for morals. So while the plot revolves around his attempts to seduce Monica Barbaro’s virtuous Madame de Tourvel for a wager with Merteuil, it is perhaps not a surprise that he genuinely falls for his target, and she for him, because in a way his seduction is entirely sincere.
Of course, there is some icky stuff here, not least Valmont’s seduction – if you want to call it that – of the young, naive Cecile (Hannah van der Westhuysen). Although never rough, he does simply impose himself on her, a puppy who won’t go until he’s given a treat. She looks traumatised at first, then eventually internalises her trauma and becomes, frankly, a much worse person. I think Elliott directs with sympathy toward her female characters, and certainly the Cecile scenes have a grubbiness lacking from previous versions. But at the same time I'm not convinced there’s room for a feminist slant here. Hampton’s play has endured in large part because it’s titillating – a rare quality in theatre – and some of it now feels wildly out of step with the times. I think if you were to adapt De Laclos today, you’d interrogate the treatment of women rather more probingly.
What can I say: it’s a really good production with two sensational leads, of a play that has long stopped being a sexy novelty and now kind of sits as problematic trash, albeit very compelling problematic trash. I don’t want to preach, I just question whether Les Liaisons really has enough going for it to justify this sort of lavish revival at our flagship theatre. But it’s here now and it’s undeniably bloody spectacular.
