Years ago, when the city of wonders and secrets
was still relatively new to me, I found myself wandering
Manhattan on a sun-drenched spring Saturday. I’d spent the
morning at Bloomingdales, as gay boys did then; it was something
of a Saturday ritual. I’d purchased a perfect pair of black
pants that, though they needed hemming, would be smashing
whenever I got them to the tailor. My boyfriend was out of town
visiting his family, and so I had the afternoon to do as I
pleased. And that was how I found myself in the tkts. line,
where I purchased one front-row mezzanine ticket to the matinee
performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Though I’d spent my junior year abroad,
studying in the south of
France, I had never before read Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century
epistolary novel. Nonetheless, I must’ve heard something about
the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production starring Alan Rickman
and Lindsay Duncan—perhaps something about their mendacious and
duplicitous characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise
de Merteuil. The set (designed by Bob Crowley) certainly looked
depraved as I took my seat; there were palace chairs scattered
about and beds dripping with muslin sheeting, as if the owners
of the palace had been caught in flagrante delicto and
then hurriedly banished. And once Rickman and Duncan began
speaking their lines and inhabiting their venal characters, I
became as seduced as Madame Tourvel, the victim of the Vicomte
and the Marquise’s evil machinations.
That afternoon, that production, became one of
those touchstones of a Manhattan youth, the sort of day that
you’re certain you remember nearly every minute of—while any
memory of the next day, and the day after that one, totally
eludes you. And so it was with a certain degree of trepidation,
as well as anticipation, that I found myself returning to the
most recent Broadway incarnation of Christopher Hampton’s
adaptation of Laclos.
Next to the 1987 production’s sex-mad boudoir, this latest
production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (starring Laura
Linney and Ben Daniels, and produced by the Roundabout Theatre
Company at the American Airlines Theatre) was a sumptuous
drawing room. With a stage floor entirely sheathed in ebony
lacquer as insidious as black ice, and with an entire wall of
glistening mirrored windows, the set by Scott Pask highlighted
the gleaming surfaces of a louche life rather than its carnal
desires. In fact, the set design’s emphasis on superficiality
over nails-in-the-flesh depravity served as a metaphor for this
latest rendition of Laclos’s novel. This was more a Watteau
painting come to life—and less of Fragonard’s The Swing,
where the woman pushed on a swing by a priest opens her legs to
her lover while high in the air. And yet if one found oneself
subconsciously yearning for the de Sadean viciousness of the
1987 production, there was the mitigating circumstance of
witnessing these deceitful scenes mirrored in perfect symmetry
on the highly reflective black lacquered floorboards. Every
fold in every shimmering gown perfectly reproduced, as if by
Ingres, for a viewer’s delectation—and as if to remind us yet
again that beneath a glittering surface lie treacherous waters.
So was it as good as what I’d remembered? Perhaps more
interesting is how the passage of time enables one to comprehend
more fully the Machiavellian undertones in the pursuit of love.
At play’s end, it’s Madame de Merteuil who’s still standing—but
is she actually the winner in Hampton’s retelling of Laclos’s
lovers—or merely the survivor?
