Gripping and enthralling this is a dazzling production. Directed by Josie Rourke this is the presentation in the National Theatre Of London (NT Live) series.
The play is set in the eighteenth century, by flattering atmospheric candlelight ( there are five chandeliers used) and, as at a theatre of the era , they are lowered, the candles cleaned and trimmed and raised again at interval.
The costumes are sumptuous. Yet there are dust sheets, scuffed walls and paintings stacked leaning against the walls as if for they are for packaging and removing. And then there is the harpsichord…
Based on the scandalous 1782 epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, the Christopher Hampton play tells the story of the love, lust, cruelty and revenge of the French nobility. Passions run high. The Marquise de Merteuil proposes a game , challenging her ex-lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, to seduce the convent-reared, 15-year-old Cecile: she seeks revenge on Cecile’s future fiance by whom she herself was once dumped. The eerie menace of the French revolution looms just out of sight…
As the scheming wicked manipulative and cynical Marquise de Merteuil, Janet McTeer is glorious. With her stunning costumes it is as if she had just stepped out of a painting by Watteau.She has a regal bearing and elegant carriage of the neck. Her character seeks revenge and is jealous of Valmont and his passion for Madame de Tourvel .Bored she calmly takes a lover, the Chevalier Danceny.
She is in part a feminist mouthpiece for Hampton to criticise the society of the period and how it viewed and treated women – (“You can ruin us whenever the fancy takes you,” she says of men. “All we can achieve by denouncing you is to enhance your prestige.”).
Does she really love Valmont ? Or is it all a cynical game to her? We get a sense of her troubled soul and also her fury at the Vicomte’s passion for Madame de Tourvel.
The Marquise has invented herself and is struggling to keep her creation alive. She eventually realises, though too late,that she is playing a game with someone who she does not want to lose.
As the Vicomte de Valmont, Dominic West is superb . A darkly handsome slightly sinister at times Don Juan figure he is cool , elegant and full of charisma that makes women swoon. In combination with the Marqiuse he is a grand manipulator of The Game, delighting in his various conquests – until he realises that he has fallen in love for real.
As Madame de Tourvel, a dark, luminous beauty, Elaine Cassidy is superb. An elegant, virtuous woman of unsullied reputation, regarded as pure and religious, the loyal wife of a magistrate, she is manipulated by Valmont, and has to overcome all her scruples and sacrifices in order to love.
At certain points, she looks like an Ingres painting. De Tourval is extremely graceful, and in the traumatic breakup in Act 2, which Valmont insists is ‘beyond his control’, she is shattered and broken in some ways like the ‘mad scene’ in the ballet Giselle.
Young, fresh , innocent Cecile de Volanges , straight out of the convent , who is way out of her depth in the society of the French court and corrupted by Valmont , was delightfully played by Morfydd Clark in a finely nuanced performance. She is a helpless pawn in the ‘games’ of the Marquise and Valmont .
The Chevalier Danceny , the music teacher in love with Cecile but corrupted by the marquise, was dashingly played by Edward Holcroft, looking like a story book, handsome Musketeer.
The sad irony is that both Valmont and Merteuil , ex lovers, are still inescapably , fatally attracted to each other.
It is now thirty years since Hampton’s play about the cynical pursuit of pleasure ignoring other’s pain, the destruction of purity and innocence, and vice hidden behind a mask of decorum, was first performed, and it still sizzles!
Running time allow 3 hours 15 minutes , including one interval. There are short ‘making of ‘ documentaries before, and interviews during the film’s interval.
LES LIASONS DANGEREUSES SCEENS is screening at selected arthouse cinemas from this coming Thursday, 9th April.