Two classics come to the Amherst Cinema this month via the National Theatre’s NT Live series. One is a courtly game of wicked wagers and voluptuous pleasures, the other a comically romantic repudiation of courtly artifice. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, playing this Saturday afternoon (and at Brattleboro’s Latchis Theater on Sunday), is beamed from London’s intimate Donmar Warehouse. As You Like It broadcasts live from the National’s expansive Olivier Theatre on February 25 with an encore on March 12 (at the Latchis on the 22nd).
The liaisons in Les Liaisons Dangereuses really are dangerous. In Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 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.
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 façade masking a heartless hollowness within.
Playing the game better than anyone else 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 will do, but 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, she was “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 fiancée. 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.
Josie Rourke, who helmed the Donmar’s harrowing Coriolanus (also seen on NT Live), directs this staging. The sensational Janet McTeer plays the Marquise, Elaine Cassidy is Mme. de Tourvel, and Dominic West (yes, fans of The Wire and The Affair, he’s actually English) is Valmont.
My favorite Shakespearean comedy may well be As You Like It. I’ve directed it three times and seen it countless others. The tale of cold hearts warmed by the delights of nature and simple living has everything – love and lust, danger and deception, mischief and magic. Its central character is also one of the Bard’s smartest and feistiest women: Rosalind, who’s banished from her uncle’s court, flees to the Forest of Arden disguised as a boy, and there, amid mistaken identities and rustic hijinks, finds love and herself.
I haven’t seen Polly Findlay’s production for the National Theatre, but I gather she has subdued the usual hijinks. As the Guardian’s critic put it, “By banishing merriment, Findlay has welcomed in humour.” The British theater’s current enfante terrible has also modernized it, making the cold, sterile court into a cold, sterile corporation. When we enter the Forest of Arden, the office furniture explodes upward to become the forest canopy, and the exiled lords exchange their blazers for Aran sweaters.
I also understand that in Findlay’s vision, the key relationship isn’t between Rosalind (Rosalie Craig) and her callow swain Orlando, with whom she plays a sassy courting game, but with her close-as-sisters cousin Celia (Patsy Ferran, who was the androgynous Jim Hawkins in Findlay’s Treasure Island at the National last season).
The London critics have given the production somewhat mixed notices, most applauding it as “endearingly eccentric” and “reelingly joyous,” some deriding the concept as “precious” and “overkill.” I guess we’ll have to decide for ourselves.
Liaisons photo courtesy of the National Theatre; As You Like It by Johan Persson
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