Unmemorable Revivals: Plenty and Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Rachel Weisz and Bryon Jennings (background) in Plenty, at New York's Public Theater. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

David Hare’s Plenty, currently receiving its first New York revival at the Public (where it was originally produced in 1982), is the portrait of an Englishwoman named Susan Traherne who experienced the most fulfilling part of her life during World War II, when she was a Special Operatives Executive courier in France. That nothing in her subsequent life has come close to bringing her that kind of satisfaction has made her restless and unhinged. She meets her husband, Raymond Brock, in Brussels in 1947 when he’s working for the Foreign Office there, and he marries her, as much out of kindness as out of love, when she’s at a low ebb in the early fifties; their union barely survives her manic eruptions, one of which forces him to resign his post at the embassy in Iran and derails his career, and it falls apart at last in the early sixties. Plenty is a complicated work with a fascinating subject that only a few other writers have tackled: how do you negotiate the rest of your life after an exciting, romantic period of total engagement that can never be equaled? (One of the characters in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, a one-time RAF flyer, suffers from this kind of letdown, and it’s the fate of the protagonist in Willa Cather’s beautiful 1923 novel One of Ours.) But as is sometimes the case with Hare’s plays, Plenty works better in your head when you’re reflecting on it afterwards than it does in performance. I’m not sure why, exactly: Hare is an unusually intelligent writer and the material is certainly dramatic, but I felt the same detachment from it in the new David Leveaux production, with Rachel Weisz as Susan, as I had when I saw the 1985 movie version, directed by Fred Schepisi, with Meryl Streep in the role.

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.)

George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman and Paula Vogel: Issues

Andrew Lawrie, Sara Topham and Jim Mezon in the Shaw Festival's production of Saint Joan. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Saint Joan, The Little Foxes, and Indecent.

George Bernard Shaw lays out the argument of Saint Joan with unerring precision. Joan is a French peasant, a teenager, unwavering in her Catholic devotion yet possessed of a country girl’s common sense; when she hears the voices of saints in the church bells, urging her to lead an army to throw the English out of France, she accepts them without doubt or hesitation and her no-nonsense certainty that she is doing the right thing convinces one man after another, right up to the Dauphin, whom she dreams of helping to crown King Charles VII. But as soon as she wins the war for him she finds herself mired in political turmoil that she doesn’t understand and that will end inevitably with her being burned at the stake. She has run afoul not only of the English (obviously) but of the church, represented by the Archbishop of Rheims and the Inquisition, who find in her intimate relationship with God a threat to the Catholic hierarchy. Even the Dauphin, now the monarch, is put off by her arrogance, which earlier he, like the officers she kicked into battle, found inspiring and sensible. The more she insists on being true to the simple faith that got her there in the first place, the more she damns herself in the eyes of the church, which forms an unholy alliance with its secular arm (and the English) to execute her.

Love and Revenge: The Blu-ray DVD Edition of Dangerous Liaisons

Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel, Les Liaiasons Dangereuses, is a diabolically unique book, a sly narrative about devious sexual games and merciless erotic warfare, told in the form of highly confidential letters between two French aristocrats – the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont – former lovers turned wicked schemers who set out to wreck the love lives of others just for the sport of it. The letters read like a series of confessionals where the artifice of their style carries the sharp pungency of juicy gossip, cadenced whispers delicately perfumed in malice. Les Liaiasons Dangereuses peeks under the accepted customs of the aristocracy only to uncover the latent sexual aggression, an arousal of decadence, that ceremonial behaviour masks. Naturally, the novel ended up condemned, banned and burned over the years as if the French aristocracy set out to destroy traces of themselves tucked away in those exchanges.

Director Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, the 1988 film adaptation of Christopher Hampton's Tony Award-winning stage play based on the de Laclos's novel, was never in danger of being condemned, banned, or burned. But it sure does full justice to the book's wickedness. Perhaps, since Frears (having already directed My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) is a true modernist, he goes beyond providing a cleverly detached voyeurism and reaches instead for the emotional and erotic power buried in the material. Most period costume dramas linger on the decor so we can swoon over all the pageantry, or they take the moral high road of Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract which dispenses with the impacted eroticism in sexual gamesmanship in exchange for cerebral muscle-flexing (to paraphrase the critic Terrence Rafferty, Greenaway is the beach bully as aesthete who kicks art in our faces). Frears, however, shows far more daring, setting up the combatants and their rules of engagement so that we can watch their masks melt away. We ultimately come to feel the full consequences of their carnal games. The artifice gives way to real flesh and blood, blood that even literally spills by the end, as Frears cuts the chords that hold the characters aloft.

A Modest Production That Must Not Be Undervalued: A Month in the Country at Williamstown

Jeremy Strong & Jessica Collins in A Month In the Country

It’s tempting to call Ivan Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country Chekhovian, but he wrote it in 1849-1850, nearly half a century before Chekhov produced The Seagull, the first of his four dramatic masterpieces. Richard Nelson’s marvellous production, which rounds off the mainstage season at Williamstown this summer, makes it clearer than ever how much of a debt Chekhov owes Turgenev. The provincial boredom and restlessness of the setting – a Russian country estate in the 1840s – anticipates the mood of scenes in all four of Chekhov's plays; the opening scene, where the mistress of the house, Natalya (Jessica Collins), grows impatient while her friend Mikhail Rakitin (Jeremy Strong) reads to her, shows up specifically at the top of act two of The Seagull. And the exchange between Natalya and her seventeen-year-old ward, Vera (Charlotte Bydwell), where she urges Vera to confide her feelings for Natalya’s son’s new Moscow tutor Belyaev (Julian Cihi), whom she herself is taken with, ends up – though considerably transformed – as the celebrated sharing of confidences between Elena and Sonia in Uncle Vanya. (It’s even in roughly the same spot in the play, halfway through.)

High Comedies: Six Degrees of Separation and Present Laughter

Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins in Six Degrees of Separation. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The current Broadway revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation begins badly and doesn’t find its feet until its leading lady, Allison Janney, does – about two-thirds of the way through, during her reading of the speech that gives the play its title. The play, a brilliant high comedy, is about the way a young hustler named Paul disrupts the lives of a number of people whose paths he crosses, most (but not quite all) of whom belong to the New York elite of the last decade of the twentieth century. Paul is an outsider in every conceivable way: he’s black (race in this play equates to class), gay and homeless. When a moneyed M.I.T. undergraduate named Trent Conway picks him up on the streets of Boston and takes him home, Paul makes a deal with him – sex in exchange for information about the prep-school classmates in Trent’s address book, now enrolled at various Ivy League colleges. (Trent is delighted to furnish details: not only does he consider he’s getting fair return for the favor, but his sexuality has always made him feel like an outsider too; he fantasizes that he can turn Paul into such an appealing faux aristocrat that when Trent shows up on his arm everyone will just have to accept them both.) Then Paul presents himself at the doors of their parents, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound he says he incurred during a mugging, claiming to know their children. He also professes to be the son of Sidney Poitier, and all of the aristocrats whose homes he’s entered on false pretenses are sufficiently impressed to take him in for the night. Paul is a scam artist and a narcissist; he’s also, it turns out, delusional. He starts to believe he really is Sidney Poitier’s son, and then he believes his other invention: that he’s the illegitimate son of Flan Kittredge, the art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa, shows him the most kindness. Six Degrees of Separation is about connection and imagination as well as class (a theme of all high comedy). But it isn’t centrally about Paul. He’s the catalyst whose interactions with those he comes across – Trent and the aspiring, adventure-seeking young actor from Utah, Rick (Rick and his wife Elizabeth also take Paul in, when they find him sleeping in Central Park) and the Kittredges – act in various ways on their imaginations. The protagonist of the play is Ouisa, who undergoes the most profound change as a result of meeting him.