When La Marquise de Merteuil (Janet McTeer) greets her niece Cecile (Elena Kampouris) with “Well , my dear, so you’ve left the convent for good,” at the beginning of Les Liaisons Dangereuses one can only guess from McTeer’s faint smirk what she has in store for the young innocent. The stage of the Booth Theater has been drably dressed to evoke various salons and bedrooms and the countryside in 18th century Paris in conspicuous states of decay by set designer Tom Scutt.
It is in those venues that wild sexual abandon, amoral deception and carnal intrigue are designated to run more than a few of the characters, aside from the niece, into a climactic state of rack and ruin. The Donmar Warehouse production of Christopher Hampton’s play, based on the 1782 epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, makes no bones about its desire to titillate, tantalize, and torment its audience (voyeurs). The sexual exploits of a vengeful Marquise, aided by her equally depraved ex-lover, the Vicomte de Valmont (Liev Schreiber), are so sinister and compulsively dramatized that the entertainment’s effect is close to revulsion as to pleasure.
If the Marquise herself is quick to admit near the end of the play that “pleasure without love leads to revulsion” the revelation cannot, nor is it intended to, prevent a denouement of insanity, death, and irreversible moral decay. Unfortunately, under the egregiously listless direction of Josie Rourke, these decadent aristocrats, with their voracious sexual appetites and unconscionable motivations, seem less like the archetypes of today’s power-possessed and manipulative movers and shakers than appear as a robotic company of mannequins that has been set in motion to get from one conquest to the next.
As the liaisons moved from the settee to the lounge to the bed, I sat back in comfort knowing I was in for three hours of what may be called safe sex. If I can admit that I found the play repellent, I have to also admit that the performances did nothing to change my response to it. Liev Shreiber is one of our great American actors as he proved with his most recent performances in A View from the Bridge, Talk Radio, and Glengarry Glen Ross, not to ignore his brilliant work in the film “Spotlight.” So let me simply say about his seemingly distant and distracted performance that it regrettably suits Le Vicomte’s remark “It’s beyond my control.”
The Marquise, consumed with jaded amorality, self-described as a “virtuoso of deceit” in these crimes of the heart is played with only a very few indications of it by the otherwise superb British actress Janet McTeer, whose also indifferent work here happily does not erase the memory of her sublime performances on Broadway in Mary Stuart and A Doll’s House.
Sorry to report that the encounters and calculated plotting between these two are likely to leave you more bored than involved. And their involvement with their prey is likely to inspire just about anything but arousal or even interest. The parallels of human exploitation in our own society are unmistakable, and I especially liked La Marquise’s arrogant pronouncement to the Vicomte, “I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.” But with all due respect for the Hampton’s dialogue, which is neither too arch nor too classically remote, I found his literary effort, as I did in the far superior 1987 production with Lindsay Duncan and the late Alan Rickman, to make every epigram, innuendo, double entendre, and nuance of speech resonate with contemporary immediacy just a bit too obvious.
While the Vicomte admits, “It’s only the best swimmer who drown,” the innocent victims who drown in this lugubrious cesspool are legion. Elena Kampouris, as Cecil, is one of the more curious characters to watch as she evolves from a naive convent girl to eager disciple d’amour. Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, as Madame de Tourvel, is neurotic enough as the disturbed and infatuated woman of unwavering morals and religious fervor.
A few noteworthy supporting performances include Ora Jones as Cecile’s gullible mother and Mary Beth Pell as the Vicomte’s world-weary aunt. Even as the Marquise states, in a rare moment of insightful ennui that, “the century is drawing to a close,” we can sense that it really an entire epoch, if most specifically this production, that is imploding.
