LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES. To 2 November.
Keswick
LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES
by Christopher Hampton
Theatre By The Lake In rep to 2 November 2005
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 31 Aug, 21 Sept, 12, 22 Oct, 2 Nov 2pm
Riuns 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 017687 74411
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 August
Corruption cuts deep in colourful revival.Choderlos de Laclos's still-shocking c1780 novel is a story of corruption, abuse of position and distortion of love. In Keswick's revival of Christopher Hampton's famous 1987 adaptation Martin Johns' set perfectly expresses the corrupt, outwardly sophisticated, inwardly hollow society in which Mme de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont seduce innocent young and loving people in emotional rapes that secretly ruin the victims' lives as the offenders entertain and play cards with their relatives.
Gorgeous, sybaritic painted sections intermix chaotically with stripped panels of gold. A painted wall revolves to reveal an action-packed bed. Such bright surfaces mask the surrounding black. This is a very shallow society.
Ian Forrest's production has its sights set perfectly on it all. Elegance and bearing, sophistication in the worst sense overwhelm innocence. Valmont and Merteuil lie, mislead and betray people whose honesty drops them trustingly into the seducers' plausible hands.
Elizabeth Marsh's tall, straightbacked Merteuil has a confidence that carries every sign of goodwill towards the people she's corrupting. Martin Fisher's Valmont, the man of most action in this female-inhabited society, doesn't quite match her easy authority. Fisher has the elegance and disguised malevolence, but there's often a sense of effort to his postures and moments of disgust with less complex mortals.
It seems a man-thing, as David Alcock's valet tips over from a mockery natural enough to anyone in Valmont's orbit to a stagey artifice detracting from his menacing corruption of others' servants. But the gallery of innocent bystanders form a perfect, staid backdrop to the central pair's connivings.
If making innocence interesting, and credible, is a difficult thing on stage then Anna Stranack and Vivienne Rowdon do a difficult thing extremely well, in suitably contrasting ways. Stranack's young Cecile moves from trust through surprise to a shock tinged with the corrupted sense of new pleasure.
Rowdon's married woman, a strict person betrayed beyond passion into love, gives a modern voice to her ancien regime character with a tact that gives vivid immediacy to her character's dissolution under her own overpowering emotion and the callousness of others.
Forrest directs with a sure hand to the end, then over-blows the final moment. Hampton deliberately looks back from the approaching fin de siecle 1980s to a 1780s anticipating the coming decade in a way history knows didn't happen. Add sounds of a rebellious crowd, red lights and a final guillotine's swish maybe, but shoving on available cast members as flag-waving sans culottes is overkill on a Jacobin scale.
Azolan: David Alcock
Mme de Rosemonde: Pamela Buchner
Valmont: Martin Fisher
Mme de Volanges: Janet Jefferies
Merteuil: Elizabeth Marsh
Danceny: Sam Newman
Tourvel: Vivienne Rowdon
Cecile: Anna Stranack
Emile: Aimee Thomas
Director: Ian Forrest
Designer: Martin Johns
Lightinbg: Nick Beadle
Sound: Andy Bolton
Fight director: Kate Waters
2005-08-11 12:58:12