Cool Lust
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage COOL LUST BY LEO SAUVAGE LONDON, this season's source of such Broadway megahits as the execrable Starlight Express and the flawed yet not unappealing Les Misérables, has finally...
...But his ideas on that subject, being ahead of their tirne, did not sit well with his superiors, who regarded the rules formulated by Marshal de Vauban a century earlier as unchallengeable...
...Although the young Danceny hardly resembles thestatueoftheCommander of Seville that comes to life and drags Don Juan down to hell, we strongly sense that from henceforth justice will take its course...
...This late glimmer of remorse puts the Vicomte's heinous career in a more nuanced light...
...he was an artillery captain given to theorizing about strategic fortifications...
...This immediately attracted the attention of no less than four government agencies in Paris, all seeking to censor the film—or Stroyberg...
...To be sure, Laclos is the source of these bawdy puns, but Hampton's touch is somehow vulgarizing...
...Designer Bob Crowly also deserves great credit for his elegant set and costumes, predominantly off-white...
...Therein lies the beginning of the end...
...More miraculously, he survived the decade that followed the taking of the Bastille...
...Early on we feel Valmont might well win, but several times he slows down and even stops fighting, as if uncertain whether his life is worth defending...
...Then, in 1985, Howard Davies of the Royal Shakespeare Company accepted a stage treatment by Christopher Hampton...
...Tourvel resists valiantly, succumbing only when Valmont goes beyond his usual strategics and gets her to fall in love with him...
...When Pierre Choderlos de Laclos first published it in 1782, he was not an established fiction writer, or a literary person of any description...
...There is little else to complain about in his adaptation, though...
...One of the most famous novels of its day, Les liaisons dangereuses was banned by royal decree in 1824 as the most infamous...
...The backdrop is a wall of translucent louvered screens that counterpoints the silken folds of the stage curtain...
...Especially impressive is the way director Davies, with Malcolm Ranson's technical assistance, enlarges the meaning of the Valmont-Danceny duel...
...But he has to pull out all the stops to overcome his next victim, the just married Madame de Tourvel (Suzanne Burden), whose beautiful innocence infuriates the Marquise...
...In addition, France's national society of writers began lobbying to have the film withdrawn, charging that it was an affront to the literary heritage of Laclos...
...Various attempts at theatrical adaptation, impeded more by the difficulty of the task than by fear of scandal, came to nothing...
...The book itself, and even its title, have periodically been the occasion for big trouble...
...He finally died of dysentery in Taranto, the old Italian city on the Ionian Sea, in 1803...
...So if Laclos was unknown in literary circles seven years before the Revolution, neither was he popular in military circles...
...Indeed, the pre-Revolutionary aristocratic couple would fit quite well into a contemporary "black humor" stage piece...
...she also wants to humiliate him just for the fun of it...
...Now Valmont is prepared to meet even the most difficult conditions she proposes in order to restore their sexual partnership—not because he is irresistibly attracted to her, but because he can't stand the idea that the decision to separate was hers...
...Nor did he simulate 18 th-century English in an effort to evoke the author's post-classical French...
...The deft lighting by Chris Parry and Beverly Emmons adds an element of mystical foreboding to the duel scene...
...Danton had made Laclos a director in the ministry of war, and unlike his many colleagues who got caught in the guillotine when the leadership changed, he not only kept his head but was elevated to general under Napoleon...
...But when Danceny learns what Valmont did to Cecile, he kills him in a duel...
...When Vadim—now in the company of Catherine Deneuve—brought his version of Les liaisons dangereuses to the United States in 1961, the New York State Education Department was ready for him with its own restrictions...
...Since every other form of perfidy is employed, however, the outcome is invariably submission...
...In both the novel and the play, Tourvel commits suicide and Cecile retreats to a cloister for the rest of her life...
...Tourvel's love turns out be so strong, so explosive, that it stirs some unaccustomed feelings in Valmont...
...The author was lucky, or had well-placed protectors, for he managed to stay out of the Bastille...
...He impudently brags of the mutual passion to Merteuil, who immediately demands that he break with Madame de Tourvel, and dictates the precise terms...
...Here, the two accounts diverge: Laclos has the Marquise grow ugly from smallpox, lose an eye and her money, and take refuge in Holland: Hampton merely suggests she will be guillotined...
...Ambivalence gives way to sadistic pleasure, however, as he composes a follow-up letter confirming the turn of events to her—with the naked back of a courtesan named Emilie (May Aston) serving as his escritoire...
...Danceny awaits marriage to the 15year-old Cecile Volanges (Beatie Edney), fresh out of the convent...
...One can discern traces of embarrassment in his cruel speech informing Tourvel that their liaison is finished...
...The letter, playing on the unconventional position in which it is being written, abounds in double-entendres...
...The Vicomte is particularly rankled to be told by her that she was "born to dominate your sex...
...On Stage COOL LUST BY LEO SAUVAGE LONDON, this season's source of such Broadway megahits as the execrable Starlight Express and the flawed yet not unappealing Les Misérables, has finally sent us something of unalloyed dramatic interest—the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les liaisons dangereuses...
...Thanks to the collaboration of an unconventional French novelist born in 1741 and a daring British playwright born exactly two centuries later, the stage of the Music Box Theater has become the refined arena for a cruel confrontation between cynical perversity and true love...
...Instead of trying to make his liaisons with the King's generals less dangerous to his career, though, Captain de Laclos sought satisfaction in a different field of combat...
...A dense mist from below creates an early-morning haze in the Bois de Vincennes, where the duel takes place...
...The production at the Music Box is superb...
...Hampton certainly cannot be criticized for toning down the gruesome destiny Laclos gave the Marquise de Merteuil...
...Their cold-blooded and ultimately tragic viciousness comes off as stylish, not to say pure, theater...
...Happily, Hampton did not "modernize" Laclos' novel...
...Merteuil wants revenge on Danceny (Hilton McRae), a young chevalier (the aristocratic rank below baron) who has withstood her advances...
...Using the same relentless logic he applied to military strategy, Laclos chronicled the amorous conquests of an aristocratic couple eager to demonstrate their sexual invincibility to each other by wreaking it on various third parties...
...Not surprisingly—yet perhaps not altogether intentionally—Les liaisons dangereuses can be seen as a sardonic exposé of the French nobility's willful recklessness at a time when Marie Antoinette could wonder why, if they had no more bread, the people did not eat brioches...
...Thanks to his one novel, Laclos has remained a big name in French letters...
...Having read Samuel Richardson—whose works in the form of exchanges of letters were esteemed by the pre-Revolutionary intellectual avant-garde consisting of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedists—he decided to write his own epistolary novel...
...Merteuil, instead of keeping her part of the deal with Valmont, announces that she has found a new lover—the Chevalier Danceny...
...Valmont's first task, then, is to obtain Cecile's surrender, which he does rather easily...
...Valmont complies...
...We can only imagine that he is thinking of Madame de Tourvel, her love for him and her decision to die...
...An English playwright, he already had to his credit The Philanthropist, a clever reworking of—and reply to—Molière's Le Misanthrope...
...The most talked about incident came in 1959, when Roger Vadim, after splitting with Brigitte Bardot, used Les liaisons dangereuses as the screenplay for a film in modern costume—with his new wife, Annette Stroyberg, appearing in no costume at all...
...The Marquise de Merteuil (Lindsay Duncan) used to be the mistress—in every sense—of the Vicomte de Valmont (Alan Rickman...
...Two chaise longues define now an aristocratic salon, now a boudoir...
...Although the victims resist at first, the seductions involve no actual violence (despite parallelism between Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, his contemporary, that would later be suggested...
...There is something almost abstract about Hampton's adaptation—it seems to push aside time and place...
Vol. 70 • June 1987 • No. 8
