Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Opening Night: October 30, 2016
Closing: January 22, 2017
Theater: Booth Theatre
Based on the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” follows former lovers, La Marquise de Merteuil and Le Vicomte de Valmont as they compete in games of seduction and revenge. These merciless aristocrats toy with the hearts and reputations of innocents. Merteuil incites Valmont to corrupt the convent-educated Cecile de Volanges before her wedding night but Valmont has other designs. His target is the peerlessly virtuous and happily married Madame de Tourvel.
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October 30, 2016
In the high-stakes sport of extreme stage acting, Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber are champion cliff divers. Give them an emotional precipice to jump from, and they’ll soar through the air and stick the landing. Think of Ms. McTeer’s dawning, devastating disillusionment as the pet wife in “A Doll’s House,” or Mr. Schreiber having the mother of all meltdowns in “Talk Radio.” Or Ms. McTeer competing with a rainstorm and winning as the title character of “Mary Stuart.” And Mr. Schreiber casting a slime of moral pollution over everything that moves as Iago in “Othello.”
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October 30, 2016
Late in the new Broadway revival of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Janet McTeer encounters a real, flickering candle. She’s playing a devious aristocrat who is angry and happy to prove her mettle. So the actress quietly puts her palm over the flame, lets it hang there for a moment — and then snuffs it out with a slap.
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October 30, 2016
“I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own,” the deliciously amoral Marquise de Merteuil tells her male interlocutor in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. As personified in a blazing performance by Janet McTeer — her voice like velvet and her physical bearing a cloak of studied artifice encasing a flesh and blood woman of ferocious cunning — there’s never cause to doubt her claim. Her accomplice-turned-opponent in their games of cruel conquest is a different matter. But even if Liev Schreiber is ill-suited for the part of the “conspicuously charming” Vicomte de Valmont, Josie Rourke’s evocative staging provides a compelling portrait of a dissolute aristocracy on the brink of devouring itself.
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October 30, 2016
The French famously call an orgasm la petite mort, “the little death”—an elegant term to justify that postcoital sadness you may sometimes feel in your lover’s arms. Tristesse, however, seems inadequate to describe the morbid, alcohol-soaked depression into which the Vicomte de Valmont has fallen. As portrayed with pickled, bullish melancholy by Liev Schreiber, Valmont may take momentary joy from seducing virgins (Elena Kampouris) and corrupting pious country ladies (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), but that endorphin high crashes fast, leaving him gulping glasses of red and squinting sourly at his own debauched badinage.
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October 30, 2016
Idle rich do the Devil’s work in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, turning innocents and believers into pliant lovers ripe for betrayal, all for their personal amusement. Cruelty and revenge are her driving passions, La Marquise de Merteuil says to Le Vicomte de Valmont, her former lover and now co-conspirator in random acts of physical and emotional devastation. They’re odd anti-heroes for our time, having been the subject of an epistolary novel published in the years leading up to the French revolution but re-emerging in modern times first through a celebrated play by Christopher Hampton seen in London and on Broadway, and then in two popular films: Stephen Frears’ 1988 Dangerous Liaisons (Hampton won an Oscar for the screenplay) and Milos Forman’s 1989 Valmont.
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