www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/nov...duncan-rsc-1986Les Liaisons Dangereuses review – Alan Rickman is a cat who knows the way to the cream
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From the archive: Christopher Hampton’s theatrical re-creation of the epistolary novel opens at the Ambassadors in London. This review was first published in
the Guardian on 17 October 1986
To think that we, who sometimes regard ourselves as victims of terminal sexual sophistication and decadence, can still be shocked by the sexual morass and disposition of 18th-century aristocratic France. But we can and we are, and I think it is this emotion which has generated much of the excitement attending Christopher Hampton’s theatrical re-creation of Laclos’s epistolary novel at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s studio theatres.
For its two principal characters, Le Vicomte, a Mephistophilis of the bedroom before whom women fall like autumn leaves, and La Marquise, a scheme roué, regard sex as the ultimate weapon in wars of revenge and humiliation or as recreation to titillate jaded limbs and minds.
Physical pleasure is an incidental adjunct in their dangerous contests. Emotional commitment is the accident which finally ruins the pleasure of the game which becomes literally war to the death.
The action played out in salons and bedrooms, suggested by Bob Crowley’s unchanging set of latticed wooden screens, white drapes and insinuating cream couches, is inspired by the exhausted passion which Le Vicomte and La Marquise entertain for each other. From the ashes of this old alliance there comes, phoenix-like, their complicity in his seduction of a 15-year-old girl and his wooing of the married La Présidente.
The play’s dramatic tension has less to do with the ultimately successful pursuit than the cynical intricate scheming by which La Marquise aspires to make her sex the masters of mankind, and the sight of Le Vicomte relishing the chase rather than the capture. The process is brought to a climax of devastating moral irony when the game goes out of control.
Those purring witty aphorisms, those discomforting epigrams, will not do when the pair are at last visited by genuine feeling. Howard Davies’s production has lost none of its moral force and clarity, but the Ambassadors theatre deprives the occasion of its intimacy, and there is no longer quite the same urgency which the original cost brought to the occasion.
Lindsay Duncan's smouldering erotic composure as La Marquise recalls Maggie Smith
Alan Rickman as Le Vicomte, with that drawling voice steeped in languor, and that impassive countenance, slips sly and inscrutable through the action like a cat who knows the way to the cream. But some of the character’s emotional and sexual nuances have vanished and at climactic points the yelps of dismay sound too hollow.
Lindsay Duncan as La Marquise, with a voice whose low-noted and pointed emphasis on single words and air of smouldering erotic composure recalls Maggie Smith, remains the play’s dynamic and emotional centre point. She still charts the progress to decline rivetingly.
None of the new recruits to the cast are yet as comfortable as the original players. Suzanne Burden as La Presidente seems to find it difficult to suggest rigid marital virtue under seige, or to make her fall from grace sufficiently horrifying. But if the production is no longer at full voltage it still illuminates a vanished age anew.
Edited by Arwen68 - 2/7/2022, 16:22
