Christopher Hampton : Les liaisons dangereuses (after Choderlos de Laclos)
Donmar Warehouse
Directed by Josie Rourke
The set is a once-elegant room in some imaginary château, the walls shabby and peeling, paintings sitting on the floor against the panelling, ready to be taken away into storage, the antique furniture, and the main doorway, draped in sheets of iridescent plastic. It's a dead room, a ghost. Then a woman's figure appears, back-lit behind the sheet over the door, and she pushes through it, and servants suddenly emerge to whisk away the plastics. We are seeing a flashback, or a piece of history, something that is dead and gone, but lives for this moment of theatre, and yet carries within it the seeds and the memory of its own demise.
Choderlos de Laclos's celebrated epistolary novel pre-dates the French Revolution by seven years. Although there's a vein of literary thought that likes to see it as a criticism of the Ancien Régime, that was about to be violently swept away, I can't say that's ever really struck me as an important facet of the novel. It is certainly a critique of his society, but not in the sense the Revolution embodied, and apart from that opening image of a lost past being revisited, and a single painting, in the last scene, displaying the French tricolour, director Josie Rourke has not attempted to overlay too much pre-Revolutionary foreshadowing onto the piece, though Christopher Hampton's adaptation would permit it if the director felt like it.
Hampton's adaptation is, of course, famous. First staged thirty years ago for the Royal Shakespeare Company, it made a star of the late Alan Rickman, and then Hampton himself made the further adaptation for the screen version starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. If not all the audience have read the original novel, it's a fair bet most of them have seen the film, and since Hampton was arranging his own work, the two versions are pretty close. As literary adaptations go, this one is really very good indeed. It's a challenge to transform a string of letters into on-stage action, especially when many of the letters are inherently deceitful in their content and you therefore have to read behind the lines. Hampton managed to whittle it down to the essential, and give it a language which is just formal enough to keep an impression of the period, yet still modern in its flow and vitality. There's just one major difference with the book - and with the film - that came as a slight surprise to me; at the end, there is no disgrace for the Marquise de Merteuil, merely a symbolic game of cards between three women, in which the chill wind of change can be felt blowing.
On the weaker end of tonight's cast were Edward Holcroft's somewhat irritating Danceny (not endearingly puppyish enough) and, disappointingly, Elaine Cassidy's Mme. de Tourvel, at least in the first act. She gained substance in the second, after her seduction, the more passionate side of the character suiting her better, but earlier she was over-prim. Mme. de Tourvel should be a sympathetic character at heart, her virtue a genuine quality, not grating self-righteousness. Morfydd Clark, on the other hand, was a very effective Cécile, naïve and candid, and she handled Cécile's seduction - which can be an awkward scene, to say the least - very well. Also excellent was Una Stubbs as the elderly Mme. de Rosemonde, delicate and fragile as a Dresden porcelain, yet with a timeless and indomitable quality about her.
Dominic West was a bold, hearty Valmont. He played the character with careless charm, as if nothing was of any consequence, and tossed off his best one-liners with a positively Wildean relish, but I missed a certain edge of malice to the character, and was never really convinced that he had actually fallen in love - although the break-up with Mme. de Tourvel was well played. However, the evening was dominated by Janet McTeer's Merteuil, statuesque and commanding physically, fire under ice emotionally, the voice a sultry purr, half-enticement, half-menace, a spider relishing her control, but whose pride tips into hubris, and destruction. Splendidly elegant in Tom Scutt's handsome costumes, she was the very embodiment of danger, admirable and hateful, an outstanding performance.
[Next: 29th January]
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