La traduzione è nella pagina seguenteTONY-BOUND SCORPIONS (1987)
By Jerry Tallmer
(New York Post, June 3, 1987 )
IT could be scorpion time at the Tonys. Two scorpions in a bottle-the two mosst elegant scorpions you ever saw. Their kiss is mockery, their wit is acid, their sting is death.
Le Vicomte de Valmont - that's Alan Rickman, up for a Tony as the year's best actor in a play. La Marquise de Merteull - that's Lindsay Duncan, up for a Tony as the year's best actress, in the same play. The drama is "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Christopher Hampton out of Choderlos de Laclos, at the Music Box.
"Why do you suppose," says Valmont to the marquise in Act II, talking of men and women and the bedroom, "we only feel compelled to chase the ones who run away?"
The marquise looks down her aristocratic nose at him. "Imaturity?" she sweetly, icily hazards.
In her dressing room at the Music Box, not so icily, having walked down from East 63d Street in 96 degree heat for want of a taxi, Lindsay Duncan said: "Well, he is, you know, awfully immature." Short pause. "And you know, that is not unfamiliar to me as a woman." She touched a hand to her long blonde hair, lifting it back from her face.
"Valmont is so completely blind," she said. "Which the marquise is not. She knows about herself, knows she dose love that man - Valmont - but will never reveal it. When he falls in love with Tourel (sic.) a chastely married woman he has just seduced to win a wager - "that, for the marquise, is the real knock-you-sideways."
Would you - so cool, so haughty on stage - be as contained about it as she is?
The actress shook out her hair. "No" she slowly said. "No. I don't think I'd be as much as she is in anything. My God," she said with a laugh, "I wish I had that woman's courage. God such blazing courage -and intelligence. But I personally wouldn't want to be associated with everything she says. Because the woman has no humanity."
In his dressing room, Alan Rickman in a Royal Shakespeare Company T-shirt and white trousers - a figure of some lassitude, not to mention longitude - stretched out his legs. "Well," he said, in a voice the vicomte's voice - like extended cotton, "that business about being compelled to chase the ones who run away, it's not the story of my life, but it's certainly the story of many of the people in the audience.
"You can hear the men laugh when Valmont says it, and the women applaud when she says: 'Immaturity?'
"I think it's the nutshell of their relationship, hers and his. He operates in a kind of well -phrased naivete. She always comes back with one word - a killer. His peacock feathers are in full spread. She just blows them away."
There are actually two Lindsay Duncans on view at this moment in New York. Very different ones. There is the marquise at the Music Box, and then there's Anthea Lahr, the stoic wife who plays an almost imploding second-fiddle to her writer-husband in "Prick Up Your Ears," the Stephen Frears movie about the late Joe Orton.
"But Anthea ia no fool by any means," Duncan said. "The Anthea in the film, I mean. I've not met the real Anthea Lahr. The one in the movie knows her own strengths, knows her husband's work requires her support and her input.
"The only thing is, she is ignored, overlooked, by another woman" - a high-powered London literary agent superbly portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.
A woman, In fact, a little like the marquise, yes?
"Yes," said Duncan.
One floor down, Alan Rickman said: "Laugh and squirm. That's what we want from the audience: laugh, and be sorry you laughed, and squirm, and then laugh again."
Choderlos de Laclos wrote "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" in 1782. Twice in this drama of moral depravity there la reference to a century drawing to its close: the end of the '80s, the beginning of the '90s.
Which might also apply, might it not, to the 1980's?
"Yes," said Rickman, his head resting languidly in his hand. "Otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. I am not interested in doing museum pieces."
CHARMING 'MONSTERS' OF 'LIAISONS' (1987)
By Leslie E Bennetts
(New York Times, May 7, 1987)
Like a pair of diabolical chess players, they plot their moves. This convent-cloistered virgin will be deflowered, her betrothed humiliated and disgraced; that respectable married woman will be destroyed, her self-worth shattered and her reputation ruined. A young man will be taken on as a lover and cast off as casually as a discarded article of clothing.
The elaborate designs of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are orchestrated with exquisite care, but the pawns are all human beings, and the weapon of destruction is sex. The Vicomte, a dashing, worldly womanizer, is the kind of man who knows to the moment how a woman's reactions to him will unfold, and whose attention strays to the next conquest even before, the latest is consummated. Equally adept at the stratagems of love and even more vicious in her motives, the Marquise is icy, beautiful and brilliant, ultimately outplotting even her clever partner in crimes of the heart.
The two central figures in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," the Marquise and the Vicomte are among the most compelling and irresistible villains to command center stage in recent memory. Moreover, the Royal Shakespeare Company production, which arrived in New York at the Music Box Theater last week, boasts both of the stars who created the roles in London.
As the Marquise, whose chiseled blond beauty belies a breathtaking talent for savagery, Lindsay Duncan is as captivating as she is chilling. With his luxuriant mane and sharp eye for the main chance, Alan Rickman, as the Vicomte, conveys both the lazy grace and the fearsome alertness of a lion that could pounce at any moment.
Both were received here with great acclaim, as they were in London. For them, the arrival of "Les Liaisons" on Broadway marks the end of a long journey; they have been playing their roles for more than a year and a half.
A Character 'in Control'Ms. Duncan, who was previously seen here in the Pubic Theater's production of "Top Girls," believes her portrayal of the Marquise has improved over time. "The most obvious thing is confidence," she said in a recent backstage interview. "I'm playing someone who always has to look as though she is completely in control. She has to sparkle,and to be menacing; she must never be under excellence in any way. I think when I started playing her, I couldn't come in at that level; I had to find it over a period of time. It's hard to glitter and be that much in control for three hours, because you don't see the cracks very often with her. It requires enormous energy to do it."
Even with experience, the dazzling Marquise remains a formidable challenge. "You have to seduce the audience," observed Ms. Duncan. "They have to be shocked and delighted by the pleasure she takes in her own skill at winning. The Marquise and the Vicomte are playing a game where the stakes are very, very, very high, and the sheer pleasure of winning is addictive. Both of them are pretty unpleasant people, but they have to have enormous charm to make it all believable that they get away with what they get away with."
Indeed, in her first few performances, Ms. Duncan said, she found she was playing to a fairly chilly silence," and realized that audiences were "appalled" by the Marquise. Since then she has made every effort to discover the character's humor, for the Marquise, even at her most venomous, can be uproariously funny.
In the play, the Marquise delivers a scathing diatribe about the double standard that forces women to resort to deceit and manipulation to counteract the powerlessness society decrees for their gender. More than 200 years later, Ms. Duncan is well aware that what her own society perceives as appealingly roguish in a man may seem simply sordid in a woman, and that a contemporary response to the Marquise and the Vicomte is shaped by its own double standard. "They are both monsters, but people will delight in what the Vicomte does quite readily," said the Scottish-born actress, who is 36 years old. "I think it's harder to make an audience laugh at and approve of what she's doing, because she's a woman."
A Political SubtextMr. Rickman, too, sees a powerful political subtext underlying the play's stirface glitter. "I'm not sure what the fascination with rich, appalling people is, except that it's vicarious," said the 41-year-old actor, who was interviewed in his dressing room. "Sometimes we would get to a point where the Vicomte would say something quite appalling which the Marquise would then top, and Lindsay and I would just sit there and laugh at the sheer barefaced cheek of it. The unutterable certainty that they have a right to anything and everything - that gives a certain power to their dialogue and I suppose that's why it's revolutionary play, too, because it says, "Is it right that we create a society that allows monsters like this to exist and to be fascinating, sexy and powerful?'"
Although the original Choderlos de Laclos novel was written in 1782, its contemporary resonance is all too clear. "I think the play is about now," Mr. Rickman added. "It's not about then. This kind of destruction goes on all the time, it seems to me. A cruder version of these lines are being said by men to women and women to men every day."
As easy as it is to condemn both the Marquise and the Vicomte, the reactions they provoke ultimately create a far more complicated and ambiguous dynamic. "We've always thought the audience must not be let off the hook, because the play is about the audience," said Mr. Rickman. "The story manipulates the audience the same way the characters manipulate each other. I think it turns over just about every moral issue you might wish to dredge up: pleasure and pain, who gets what, who inflicts what, what's it all about anyway, sex without a relationship, a relationship without sex, all those conflicting equations. You may be exhilarated or depressed or outraged, but don't come to see this play and sit back and say, 'Entertain me.'"
Ms. Duncan added: "People are thrown back on their own morality by this play. You're laughing at things that are unspeakable: people's pain, humiliation. Are you laughing with nervous horror? Are you laughing with recognition? These two characters are immoral; they give themselves carte blanche, and as you witness that and laugh at it and/or are shocked by it, it's got to make you think where you stand in relation to them."
Edited by Ida59 - 20/11/2012, 22:55
E' di un sexy che fa paura!! Roba da sbatterlo sul divanetto, dopo aver ribaltato per terra la Duncan, e violentarlo! Oooppss, minorenni tappatevi le orecchie 
In quanto alla donna glaciale, trovo anch'io che sia insopportabile! 
