In the early 1780s, on Île-d’Aix, a small island off the west coast of France, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos began writing his best-known work. Dangerous connections. It would have been difficult for Laclos to imagine that a theatrical production of the novel would captivate audiences some 250 years later. After all, he was a failed playwright; his comedy-operatic libretto Ernestine (1777) received only a single public performance, albeit one attended by Marie Antoinette. However, his epistolary novel, a malevolent tale of seduction and betrayal, was one scandal successnot least because it is often considered to be an attack on the old regime himself. But the new adaptation at the National Theater proves that it is much more than that.
For lack of better entertainment, Marquise de Merteuil (Lesley Manville) and Vicomte de Valmont (Aidan Turner), two amoral lovers whose relationship has turned into rivalry, turn to entertainment through sexual conquests and the destruction of others. The play opens with a ball. Manville enters with an air of superiority and elegance before breaking out into a mix of baroque and contemporary dance. Throughout the play, the actors fall into these interludeschoreographic sequences between scenes that serve to heighten emotions. Introductions are made to Cécile de Volanges (the astonishing Hannah van der Westhuysen), a victim of Merteuil and Valmont’s twisted fun. Later, we meet Madame de Tourvel (the ever-elegant Monica Barbaro), a pious – and married – friend of Valmont’s aunt, whom the unscrupulous Casanova sets his sights on.
Christopher Hampton returns here to his 1985 play (he also wrote the screenplay for the 1998 Stephen Frears film adaptation starring John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer) and sets it in a timeline of its own, drawing inspiration from the aesthetic of pre-revolutionary France, but with a sharp, metallic modernity. The walls turned into hidden doors are lined with mirrors that reflect not only the actors, but also the audience itself. As was sometimes the case in Laclos’s 18th-century Paris, the mirrors are crowned with rococo paintings of women in various stages of undress, though delicate pastels are washed out in shades of gray and white. Rosanna Vize’s set design, combined with Natalie Roar’s costumes, manage to be both exquisitely ornate yet have a gritty contemporary minimalism.
When the novel was published in 1782, many questioned whether the letters at the center of the story were in fact real. In Hampton’s play they serve as proof and later a means of the downfall of Merteuil and Valmont. But where Laclos’ novel focuses on the intrigues of the main protagonists, the play aims to examine the psychological impact on the victims of their torturous mind games.
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Manville and Turner are phenomenal. By skillfully manipulating atmosphere and tension, they manage to make the audience sympathize with their characters’ amorality against their better judgement. As the play unfolds, the impact of their “games” subtly changes their personalities. As the story turns from restless fun to ominous cruelty, the warm yellow glow of the lighting fades to white; Turner goes from piper Vicomte to a deranged man psychologically burdened by his conflicting emotions; The composed marquise finally snaps. Manipulators have become manipulated. As Valmont says: “It’s always the best swimmers who drown.”
There is a universality for Dangerous connections: “Mind games,” “manipulation,” and “gassing” seem like 21st-century phenomena, but what Laclos points out, and Hampton reinforces, is that there’s been little change in how we process and deal with our emotions—especially our capacity for mischief—over the centuries. No matter how hard we try to dominate them, they will always get the best of us in the end.
After the final bow, when the actors leave the stage in a wave of satin skirts and a crisp white shirt, the audience is forced to do what Merteuil and Vicomte were reluctant to face at the end of the play – sit in silence and study their many reflections in the wall of mirrors.
(Further reading: Romeo and Juliet are disappointed)
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