For its latest production, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s turning to spicy French classic ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’. Steve Wright gets corrupted.

What’s striking is how similar, and yet opposite, the two main protagonists are. Valmont dedicates his life to sex and sexual conquests: he uses people for sex. Mme de Merteuil is big on sex too, but in a subtly different way. Valmont uses power to get sex: she uses sex to get power.” From George Etherege’s rakish comedy ‘The Man of Mode’ to William Wycherley’s sexually explicit ‘The Country Wife’, director Jenny Stephens has presided over some fairly – how to put this? – peppery productions with the talented thesps-in-waiting at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in recent years – but her and BOVTS’s forthcoming production of ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ might just be the spiciest yet.

Banned in its native France on grounds of immorality for much of the 19th century, Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 epistolary novel follows the sexual intrigues and power machinations of two co-conspirators, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. As those grandiloquent names suggest, both are members of the French aristocracy (we are in the dying days, did they but know it, of the Ancien Regime, a few years before the guillotine made its first descent). Merteuil and Valmont are quintessential idle, decadent aristocrats, with no cares nor chores to fill their days other than relentless intriguing and the corruption, via gossip and seduction, of those around them – chiefly either the young or the outwardly respectable.

Valmont, for example, is hell-bent on seducing the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, while the Marquise vows to corrupt the young Cécile de Volanges, whose mother has only recently brought her out of a convent to be married to a former lover of Merteuil who rejected her. Cécile, meanwhile, falls in love with her music tutor, the dashing and pure young Danceny: Merteuil and Valmont make a show of helping the secret lovers in order to gain their trust, so that they can use them later in their own schemes. Cue a trail of wanton seduction, revenge, slander and reputation-ruining.

“It’s an extraordinary piece,” Jenny continues. “I’ve tended to do Restoration comedies with the Theatre School – and they’ve been great fun, very funny and bawdy. This is a bit different – a far more modern play, based on a great French novel [the script is a 1985 adaptation by playwright/translator Christopher Hampton].”

Valmont and (in particular) Merteuil are, says Jenny, the play’s dramatic heart, drawing others around them into their lewdly manipulative world. “When there are other people in the room, they behave and talk quite differently: but when they are alone together, their language is so intimate and sensual. It’s incredibly powerful. But everywhere, beneath the very mannered social front, there is seething sexual tension. There is widespread corruption and depravity, over which these upper-class protagonists spread a veneer of respectability. And the depravity of it – there is rough sex, dangerous sex. The frisson of these ‘dangerous relationships’ is extraordinary.”

One interesting debate that has swirled around Laclos and his ‘Liaisons’ is that of the author’s view of his subjects. Laclos himself was a military man, respectably married soon after the novel’s publication – in short, a pillar of the (albeit moribund) French establishment. And yet it is never quite clear (in a book composed entirely of letters and thus lacking authorial comment) whether Laclos celebrates or condemns Valmont and Mertueil’s libertinage and amoral pursuit of, respectively, sex and power.

“I think that Christopher Hampton’s adaptation gives a subtle sense that they are fiddling while Rome burns, and that the French Revolution is not far off,” Jenny reflects. “Laclos didn’t know what was in store, and the book doesn’t seem to either praise or condemn this lifestyle – it merely exposes it, and leaves audiences to make their own minds up. It’s intelligent and subtle in that way.”

Sex – talked about and indulged in; loving and, far more often, manipulative – is ever-present in the book. It must be an intense and intimate piece of theatre to stage, Venue suggests to Jenny. Are the students responding eagerly (“Yes!”), or are there difficult days during rehearsals? “No! They’re fantastic. Ali Watt, who plays Valmont, is extraordinarily joyous with the sexuality, as well as being predatory. But even among the smaller parts, everyone is making real sense of what they’re doing, and it feels like a very strong company production. They have approached it with a real intelligence and a really honest sexuality. And yes, the play is shocking – but because the writing doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t say, ‘ooh, isn’t this terrible’, the actors aren’t doing that either. That makes it more shocking, and also leaves the audience to make their minds up.”

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES IS AT THE REDGRAVE THEATRE, BRISTOL TO SAT 19 MAR. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.

Copyright Steve Wright 2011

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