Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Through the mysteries of corporate theatredom, a Donmar Warehouse production is broadcast as part of National Theatre Live. Confusing, but no matter. Whoever produced and digitally beamed it, this was strong production of Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Laclos's epistolary novel. I remembered some lines of the script vividly from the 1988 film with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. Tonight's Valmont was Dominic West, opposite Jane Mcteer's Marquise de Merteuil. Two voices one certainly did not tire of over the two and a half hours of this production. They were as silkily smooth as any executives planning a takeover, as they planned a young girl's destruction merely as a petty act of vengeance (her prospective husband had dumped Madame de M) and a sexy teasing game. West's Valmont was all genial charm at the outset, in the second half increasingly out of his depth as he found himself in a new emotional universe. The scene when the single word 'unprecedented' triggers the fatal chain of events that leads the characters into hell was briliantly played, the smallest tilt of McTeer's regal head communicating the most violent feelings. Hampton's script offers marvellous female parts, and both Morfydd Clark (Cécilie) and Elaine Cassidy (Madame de Tourvel) charted affecting journeys from demure propriety to what another era would have called debauchery. Ed Holcroft was the naive Chevalier Danceny, drawn into a battle he could not understand. The play did not take in Merteuil's smallpox or the public humiliation at the opera, but the production communicated an air of pre-revolutionary doom in the flickering, shadowy light cast by chandeliers and Tom Scutt's set of steadily denuded, fading walls, stripped of paintings and revealing stonework beneath. I loved the stylish scene changes, balletic movement over gorgeous vocal music.

Tragedy is meant to be inevitable, but in this one one had an aching sense of how things might have played out therwise. It was clear that beneath the cynicism love's embers still glowed between the lead characters. With just a modicum of moral decency Valmont and Madame de Merteuil could even have found a warm gossipy happiness together. How self-destructive vanity and social sophistication can be. I suppose that is what Laclos intended us to think. In the interval tallk we learned the interesting fact that Josie Rourke first directed this when she was nineteen, by which age she had had sex about four times. And Christopher Hampton observed that to feel the play's modernity you actually have to do it in period eighteenth-century dress and interiors. When you take the historical period away, the contemporary buzz is lost. A terrific evening and I'm grateful to my French friend C, who invited me to take up a spare ticket.