Lesley Manville in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: An Actress Becomes a Legend

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Photo: Sarah Lee.)

It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched anti-heroes, Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, best of friends and former lovers who manipulate everyone around them for their amusement and to enact private revenge plots, were played by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. In the triumphant 1988 Stephen Frears movie, called Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close and John Malkovich took over the roles, a case of seeming miscasting that, as it turned out, worked brilliantly. (There have been two other film adaptations, a very amusing updated one from 1959 directed by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe and an unfortunate one called Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, released the year after Frears’s. And Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are featured in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which sets the story in a Manhattan prep school. It’s trashy but a sexy, funny diversion.)

I wish I’d seen Rickman and Duncan. But the latest British revival, directed by Marianne Elliott, is the fourth stage version I’ve caught and the third I’ve enjoyed. I didn’t think much of Josie Rourke’s, which began in the West End in 2016 and was imported to Broadway, though Liev Schreiber gave a very sly performance as Valmont (opposite Janet McTeer as Merteuil). Laura Linney starred in Rufus Norris’s version at the Roundabout in 2008 with Ben Daniels; two of Canada’s most heralded actors, Seana McKenna and Tom McCamus, were paired in 2010 at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in a production helmed by Ethan McSweeney. The National Theatre revival, which made this year’s NT Live slate – movie audiences got it last week – pits Aidan Turner against Lesley Manville, whose back-to-back performances as Jocasta in Robert Icke’s rethought modern Oedipus and as Merteuil have surely secured her a place on the top rung of English actresses. Greek tragedy and English high comedy in the same season! Manville’s Jocasta was heartbreaking, and she and Icke shifted the focus of the play from the title character (played by Mark Strong) to the wife-mother who, unlike Thebes’s monarch, doesn’t stumble offstage after the play’s tragic onslaught. I can’t imagine that anyone who saw Manville’s performance and heard her devastating recitation of Jocasta’s speech about the child she bore to Oedipus’s father when she was practically still a child herself, and then saw him stolen from her, will ever view this character in the same way again.

Until I saw Manville’s, my favorite Merteuil was Linney. She gave the character a serene contemptuousness, a regal air of infinite patience that conveyed how restricted her tolerance for the inferior specimens around her truly was. Everyone around her who wasn’t merely blinded by the stupidity of youth received a much harsher reception from her, and we read in Linney’s slightest shift of expression the degree to which they had displeased her. It was in the way her smile became glacéed, the way her hauteur acquired a barely perceptible overlay of boredom. The sole quality missing from her Merteuil was the one you might have thought essential: sensuality. But Linney played her as pathological, wounded in some mysterious way that made her incapable of contentment or of allowing happiness in others. So it was fine that you didn’t believe her capable of losing herself in sexual passion; this lady never let go of the reins and was constitutionally ill-equipped to experience a moment of perfect bliss.

However the actress chooses to interpret Merteuil – as a proto-feminist who learned as a young (virginal) bride that knowledge is power and can make a woman in Laclos’ late-eighteenth-century French society the master of her own fate, or as a consummate liar who gets away with whatever she can, leading the licentious life no one (except Valmont) imagines her capable of – there’s obviously a deficiency in this woman. Her behavior is a response to the damage she’s endured. She sets Valmont, her only true comrade-in-arms, the mission of seducing Cécile de Volanges (Hannah van der Westhuysen), a virgin straight out of the convent; he thinks it’s a challenge unworthy of him, but her aim is to make a laughingstock of the lord her mother (Cat Simmons) has chosen as her husband because he was once Merteuil’s lover and discarded her for another woman. Valmont eventually agrees: he acts as a go-between between Cécile and the real object of her adoration, the callow Chevalier Danceny (Darragh Hand), gaining her confidence and the key to her chamber and then beginning a course of sexual instruction that, as he tells Merteuil, will make her as comfortable in bed as the most seasoned professional. But at the same time Valmont pursues his own agenda – to get the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Monica Barbaro) to fall for him and break down her Christian forbearance. He and Merteuil become allies in this scheme too: she makes his conquest of Tourvel part of the bargain – his prize to be a night with Merteuil that will reinvigorate the supreme sexual pleasure he lost when they stopped being lovers and became confidants. But she demands written proof that he has succeeded with Tourvel, and the longer it takes him to seal the deal, the more delight Merteuil takes in baiting him by bemoaning the diminution of his famous charms. (Merteuil’s lifestyle has to remain a secret or she would lose her standing in the aristocracy; Valmont, in no social danger as a man, is a notorious rake.)

But something goes wrong: in the course of getting Tourvel to fall in love with him, he tumbles for her. And Merteuil is furious. Manville certainly isn’t the first actress to trace her anger and her subsequent turning on him to jealousy; it’s the complexity of the link the actress creates between those two emotions that makes the performance so profoundly compelling. Manville, an actress of sublime clarity, isolates the moment when she first suspects the effect Tourvel is having on Valmont – before he himself even realizes it – and then we see every successive crack she spots in his presentation of the Tourvel scenario as a self-amused tribute to his own romantic genius. I had a good time watching Glenn Close in the Frears film (it’s one of the rare times when one of her performances has worked for me), but much of its enjoyment is in its theatricality. There’s nothing performative about Manville’s approach. This actress is one of the great textual readers: when you hear the simultaneous subtlety and razor sharpness of her excavations of Hampton’s staggering dialogue, you think of Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench. But she doesn’t ride the language; she lives deep inside it.

Elliott has assembled a first-rate supporting cast, including Gabrielle Drake as Valmont’s wise and compassionate aunt, Madame de Rosemonde (who is acutely aware of his faults but loves him despite them) and Sharif Afifi as his servant Azolan, who plays Leporello to his Don Giovanni. The only member of the cast who doesn’t come through is Aidan Turner, who is flashy and superficial. I had a similar problem with Ben Daniels in the Roundabout Liaisons Dangereuses, but he did something remarkable with the moment when he explains to Merteuil why, temptingly close to winning Tourvel over, he failed to go in for the kill because he was “moved.” He gave the word a curdled quality, as if he were repulsed by his own capacity for pity. It’s sometimes fun to watch Turner get at the grossness in sexual acquisitiveness, as if he were Rip Torn playing the Wolf in Into the Woods. But he’s obvious in a company where nobody else is. (Also, why didn’t anyone point out to him that he’s mispronouncing “Merteuil”?)

Elliott has staged the show beautifully, except for the overstated metaphorical dance numbers that occur mostly during scene shifts. I would cut all of them; they’re even badly choreographed (by Tom Jackson Greaves). On the other hand, Rosanna Vize’s set, with its mirrors and corridors dotted with identical doors, makes its conceptual points suggestively. I loved looking at the set, over which hovers a sort of empty illuminated mirror ball. Natalie Roar’s costumes, which bridge the classical with the modern, are sumptuous, as they must be in any production of this play.

Hampton’s original script ends, like the Laclos novel, by punishing Valmont (well, he punishes himself) but Merteuil isn’t exposed and so doesn’t lose her place in society. When he penned the screenplay for the Frears movie, Hampton changed it, to maintain the twisted morality play aspect of the book. The movie’s finale is better, and I see that Hampton has now altered the ending of the play to replicate that of the picture. But he’s also added a scene between Merteuil and Cécile, now wed to her lord, that implies that she is on the cusp of turning into the latest version of Merteuil. It doesn’t come off; it’s too on the nose, and van der Westhuysden’s metamorphosis isn’t convincing. Not her fault – I can’t envision an actress in the role who wouldn’t just seem to be embodying a playwright’s bit of trickery. It doesn’t matter much, though, because here as throughout the show, Lesley Manville is riveting.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.