In director Marianne Elliot’s slick stage version of the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Lesley Manville is predictably superb. She plays the Marquise de Merteuil, a supreme manipulator of 18th century French high society.
Her tools include Aidan Turner’s Valmont, her devoted lover-with-benefits who seduces and abuses innocents both as a lifestyle choice and as a weapon to satisfy De Merteuil’s whims and ambitions. She also deploys the barbed lines in Christopher Hampton’s script with unmatched aplomb and timing.
But in the age of Epstein revelations there is a question posed by the decision to revive this play first seen in 1985. How do you deal with a work with sexual exploitation at its heart but with the intention to entertain in its DNA? A slightly unfair answer might be by keeping the exploitation but ditching the entertainment.
In this large scale production with a cast of 22 there are choreographed interludes in formal wear that convey – what? Perhaps they exist to contrast above board courting rituals with Valmont’s sordid seduction techniques. But they seem to replace the entertainment derived from Hampton’s witty script (and screenplay for the 1988 film) which only reveals itself when Manville is talking.
The airy Lyttleton stage lends little sense of cloistered conspiracy as Melville’s De Merteuil and Turner’s Valmont plan their conquests. The tone of the evening is never clear partly because Turner’s chest baring Valmont is a manosphere animal who swaggers more than seduces. His most conspicuous success is not from the magic of charisma but because he stole a bedroom key.
There is one moment however where his Valmont is stopped in his tracks by the unexpected sensation of feeling the very emotion he has been faking all his love life. Here his prey is Madame de Tourvil played by Monica Barbaro, the show’s other stand-out performance. The American actor, whose Joan Baez won her an Oscar nomination in A Complete Unknown (her duet with Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is one of the best film moments of last year) delivers a performance that is so much classier than Turner’s Valmot it’s hard to believe she’d fall for an 18th century French Andrew Tate.
Valmont’s moment of realisation delivers a sudden emotional heft. Yet it is all too fleeting and too rare, leaving the other question posed by the revival – why revive it ? – unanswered
Les Liaisons Dangereuse
National Theatre
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