The liaisons in Les Liaisons Dangereuses really are dangerous. In Christopher Hampton’s 1980s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1780s epistolary novel of seduction and deceit, “the game” of sexual power and intrigue destroys two lives and threatens to ruin at least one more. But right now at Shakespeare & Company, it’s played out with such panache and brittle humor that it’s a perfect sizzler for a chill winter evening.
Writing just a few years before heads began to roll in the French Revolution, Choderlos de Laclos used sexual exploitation to mirror his age, when the nobility indulged in frivolous pleasures at the expense of the powerless. The courtly graces, stylish repartee and seductive maneuvers were a slowly cracking fa?ade masking a heartless hollowness within.
Tina Packer’s production beautifully captures both the surface and the void. Everyone bows and curtsies in greeting or parting, and everyone has a slightly hunted look. Everyone, that is, but the impassive, indifferent servants and the two young would-be lovers, who haven’t yet learned the art and artifice of love—but will do soon enough.
Their teachers are the “conspicuously charming” Vicomte de Valmont and the beautiful Marquise de Merteuil, a self-styled “virtuoso of deceit.” They are former lovers who are now almost a team, relishing the reports of each other’s sexual conquests as much as the act itself. Merteuil is the more complex and ruthless of the pair. Valmont, after all, is simply a man, doing what men do, just more successfully and scandalously than anyone else in Paris. The Marquise is obliged to play the feminine part, coy and corseted, but as she tells Valmont, “born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.”
To revenge herself on an ungrateful lover, she enlists Valmont to deflower the man’s 15-year-old fianc?e. But Valmont has a quarry in mind more worthy of his reputation: Mme. de Tourvel, a chaste and devout young wife. In the end, he undertakes both exploits, with consequences both farcical and disastrous.
Over the last few seasons, Elizabeth Aspenlieder has become Shakespeare & Company’s prima diva, and here she does her best work to date. Her Merteuil is a sleek spider, manipulating her web of intrigues with a practiced hand and a voice that drips sweet venom. As Valmont, Josh Aaron McCabe is plenty dashing, with an amusing dash of amour propre, but the man needs to be genuinely charming to convincingly pull off his multiple conquests, and too often McCabe descends to a parody of the sleazy seducer.
The supporting cast is agreeable and effective, including Jennie Burkhard Jadow and Ren?e Margaret Speltz as a couple of matrons, clueless about the sexual shenanigans going on around them; Lydia Bartlett-Mulligan and Enrico Spada as the callow but eager youngsters; and especially Kelly Galvin, luminous and vulnerable as Mme. de Tourvel.
Tina Packer sees the play as both a stately dance of precise, suggestive steps (nicely choreographed by Kristin Wold and gorgeously costumed by Govane Lohbauer) and a game with set rules but unexpected moves. It begins and ends with a card game, and in two scenes Merteuil and Valmont punctuate their verbal sparring with chess-piece strides across the parqueted floor.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses: 7 p.m., Friday-Sunday through March 21, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, (413) 637-3353, shakespeare.org.
