On Stage/Dangerous Liaisons
Bawer, Bruce
ON STAGE DANGEROUS LIAISONS In 1782, a French soldier with the im- pressive name of Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos—who would go on to become an associate of Danton's during the...
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...You betcha—just like the conversation of junior-highschool boys...
...in his native land the evolution of a 'social bond individualism' that had emanated from the environs of Concord and Walden Pond...
...After all, this is the Royal Shakespeare Company, the actors have great British accents, and the dialogue is rich in words like "vociferously...
...George M. Curtis, III is Professor of History at Hanover College and James J. Thompson, Jr., is Book Review Editor of The New Oxford Review...
...she-asks with surprise...
...dollars...
...For example, la Marquise says things like, "I'm not sure how appropriate an emotion love is, especially in marriage," and dryly declares that Cecile "has acertain innate duplicity which is going to stand her in very good stead...
...In general, however, they come off not as serious symbols of decadence but as sitcom villains, the kind of Bad Guys out of some TV show like "Get Smart" who grin and rub their hands together and say, "We're so baaaaaaad...
...Another point—which la Marquise expresses in a line that I rather liked—is that "vanity and happiness are incompatible": le Vicomte, who's fallen in love with la Presidente de Tourvel (something that doesn't happen in the novel), nonetheless destroys her because to let himself love would be to forsake power and invite vulnerability...
...On the contrary, Laclos was incensed by the decadence of many members of the French upper classes of his day, and in his only novel—which achieved an enormous succes de scandale—the tone he took toward his high-born characters' unscrupulous sexual intrigues was one of unmitigated indignation...
...This is another of the play's big laugh lines...
...And no wonder, for the play doubtless reminded most of them of their favorite TV sitcoms...
...Foreword, preface, acknowledgments, index...
...From time to time Mr...
...Indeed, the play's author, Christopher Hampton, encourages us to laugh along with the corrupt and high-spirited Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont as they weave their scummy plot, which involves the seduction by the Vicomte—Paris's most notorious womanizer—of two chaste ladies: la Presidente de Tourvel (Suzanne Burden) and Mlle...
...This time out, the RSC should've stuck to the Bard...
...Finally, the numerous brown leaves which lie scattered at the edges of the stage symbolize the impending death of the privileged society portrayed in the play...
...Most of the job of adumbration is carried out by the play's single set (designed by Bob Crowley), which does multiple duty as various characters' salons and bedrooms "in and round Paris and in the Bois de Vincennes...
...In Les Liaisons dangereuses, in short, Christopher Hampton tries to straddle two widely separated genres and falls flat on his face...
...On the contrary, the performances are uniformly good, though Alan Rickman, as the supposedly dashing and irresistible Vicomte, does look (from the back row of the Music Box's mezzanine, anyway) a bit like Barry Manilow in a beard and sound at times like Peter O'Toole with a head cold...
...Which all goes to prove that if you put actors with British accents in period costumes and shove them on a Broadway stage, they can get away with almost anything...
...Yet the play's dialogue and action make few references, even of an implicit nature, to the forthcoming revolution...
...He discovered...
...For instance, each scene in the play ends with a fortissimo blast of ominous harpsichord music (which is, alas, more than a bit reminiscent of the melodramatic chords that they used to play—and perhaps still do—before the commercial breaks on TV soap operas...
...It's a cleverly conceived set...
...woman in front of me noted approvingly to her companion, "It's so full of double entendres...
...Aside from the two chaise longues, two period tables, a half-dozen or so period chairs, and a very tall white column (a phallic symbol...
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...This line draws a big laugh...
...What jokes...
...Several fifteen-foot-high wooden screens upstage, between which the characters enter and exit, may be intended to suggest the nobility's screening itself off from the growing unrest outside...
...Much of it, for example, consisted of tireless "Three's Cornpany'Ltype smirking about sex...
...Throughout most of the play, however, these serious intentions are communicated less by the dialogue—which is almost always reaching for a laugh—than by such things as music and set design...
...But it's far too heavyhanded for this particular play...
...Such sexually suggestive words and expressions as "position," "mounting excitement," "keep it up," and "stiffen his resolve" occur frequently—with deadpan comic emphasis—in the conversation of la Marquise and le Vicomte, and the audience roars delightedly, taking this puerile material for drawing-room wit at its most sophisticated...
...N of that the acting is inadequate...
...LthertyPress/LibertyClassics THE SOUTHERN ESSAYS OF RIICJIARD M. WEAVER Foreword by George Core Edited with Preface by George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr...
...Hardcover $10.00 0-86597-057-2 Paperback $ 4.50 0-86597-058-0 Liberty Fund edition, 1987 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...The Vicomte complains to la Presidente de Tourvel that he's been "more celibate than a monk...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...This collection of fourteen of Weaver's essays on the South and Southern history is presented in demonstration of George Core's point that "few critics of the South rival Richard Weaver in comprehensiveness of vision and depth of thought...
...A further point of the play is that, while all these people are busy jumping in and out of bed, France is on the eve of revolution...
...But Hampton's not just out for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 33 laughs here...
...The Broadway version of Les Liaisons dangereuses, which is currently playing at the Music Box Theater under the direction of Howard Davies, takes a far lighter approach to its subject...
...Weaver's appreciation of liberty was rooted in his understanding of Southern history...
...Bawer will also be reviewing plays for TAS...
...Indeed, watching the play one has the distinct feeling that Hampton has been spending altogether too much time hanging around school-yards...
...It's as if Hampton wants the set—and those blasts of dour harpsichord music—to do most of the work of conveying the play's "serious" side while the actual dialogue, most of the way through, lies squarely in the realm of sex farce...
...Hampton has set the play in the late 1780s not only so that la Marquise, in one of the closing scenes, can face the audience and say something about it being "more than halfway through the eighties," but also so that we can recognize that it was the decadence of such aristocrats as these that precipitated the French Revolution (which, you'll remember, came along in 1789...
...The night I saw the play, most of the audience did laugh, loud and long...
...As for Lindsay Duncan, the actress who plays la Marquise, her breathy voice, frosty manner, sardonic tone, and imperious carriage all suit her role perfectly, though they do add up to something that is a tad too- reminiscent of Joan Greenwood's classic performance as Charlotte in the film version of The Importance of Being Earnest...
...One point of the play, apparently, is that women have to be deceitful to get along in a man's world...
...ichard M. Weaver (1910-1963) was one of the leading -1-‘-figures in the post World War II development of an intellectual, self-conscious conservatism...
...266 + xxii pages...
...He wants us to see his story not only as the French bedroom comedy he's turned it into but also as a tragic story somewhat closer to the severe morality tale that Laclos wrote two centuries ago...
...And who's to say it isn't sophisticated...
...Cecile Volanges (Beatie Edney...
...Two or three mirrored windows indicate, again, the rich, decadent characters' absorption in their own salon and bedroom intrigues, and perhaps also suggest that the play has something to say to and about those of us in the nineteen-eighties as well...
...U-101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987...
...As the loud, nasal-voiced Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer and the author of The Middle Generation and The Contemporary Stylist...
...More...
...Among the essays included are "Lee the Philosopher" (1948), "Agrarianism in Exile" (1950), "The Tennessee Agrarians" (1952), and "Two Types of Individualism" (1963...
...Like many eighteenth-century novels, notably Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), Laclos's book was epistolary in form and took as its theme the struggle between maidenly virtue and libertinism...
...At one point, for instance, la Marquise suggests that she is not a villain after all but a sex-role freedom fighter: "I've always known," she tells le Vicomte, "I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own...
...As le Vicomte says, with slimy admiration, to la Marquise: "You are a genuinely wicked woman...
...But Les Liaisons dangereuses was no spirited celebration of sensuality, like Tom Jones...
...It is, of course, precisely the sort of line that always draws a big laugh on Broadway, the reason being that Broadway audiences, for the most part, don't go to plays like Les Liaisons dangereuses to be entertained or to experience art so much as they go to feel sophisticated—to preby Bruce Bawer tend for two hours that they do know the stories one hears in Paris...
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...ON STAGE DANGEROUS LIAISONS In 1782, a French soldier with the im- pressive name of Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos—who would go on to become an associate of Danton's during the Revolution and a general under Napoleon at the turn of the century—published a novel called Les Liaisons dangereuses...
...the set contains a number of provocative items...
...Well," he says, "you know the stories one hears in Paris...
...Every so often, moreover, Hampton's characters depart from their vapid banter and deliver a "serious" line or two...
...Which is in fact rather appropriate, for the play is rife with cynical, would-be Wildean quips about love and honesty and marriage...
...A twelve-foot-high chiffonier out of whose open drawers spills forth a chaos of jewelry and documents—an oddity that no one in the play ever comments upon—alludes to the imminent sacking of the aristocrats' houses by the peasants...
...La Marquise and le Vicomte do a lot of talking about how evil they both are...
...Yet following his untimely death his work, for the most part, faded from view, though his most important and widely cited book, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), still is in print...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
