|
Years
ago, when the city of wonders and secrets
was still relatively new to me, I found
myself wandering Manhattan on a sun-drenched
spring Saturday. I’d spent the morning at
Bloomingdales, as gay boys did then; it was
something of a Saturday ritual. I’d
purchased a perfect pair of black pants
that, though they needed hemming, would be
smashing whenever I got them to the tailor.
My boyfriend was out of town visiting his
family, and so I had the afternoon to do as
I pleased. And that was how I found myself
in the tkts. line, where I purchased one
front-row mezzanine ticket to the matinee
performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Though I’d spent my junior year abroad,
studying in the south of France, I had never
before read Choderlos de Laclos’s
18th-century epistolary novel. Nonetheless,
I must’ve heard something about the Royal
Shakespeare Company’s production starring
Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan—perhaps
something about their mendacious and
duplicitous characters, the Vicomte de
Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. The
set (designed by Bob Crowley) certainly
looked depraved as I took my seat; there
were palace chairs scattered about and beds
dripping with muslin sheeting, as if the
owners of the palace had been caught in
flagrante delicto and then hurriedly
banished. And once Rickman and Duncan began
speaking their lines and inhabiting their
venal characters, I became as seduced as
Madame Tourvel, the victim of the Vicomte
and the Marquise’s evil machinations.
That afternoon, that production, became one
of those touchstones of a Manhattan youth,
the sort of day that you’re certain you
remember nearly every minute of—while any
memory of the next day, and the day after
that one, totally eludes you. And so it was
with a certain degree of trepidation, as
well as anticipation, that I found myself
returning to the most recent Broadway
incarnation of Christopher Hampton’s
adaptation of Laclos.
Next to the 1987 production’s sex-mad
boudoir, this latest production of Les
Liaisons Dangereuses (starring Laura Linney
and Ben Daniels, and produced by the
Roundabout Theatre Company at the American
Airlines Theatre) was a sumptuous drawing
room. With a stage floor entirely sheathed
in ebony lacquer as insidious as black ice,
and with an entire wall of glistening
mirrored windows, the set by Scott Pask
highlighted the gleaming surfaces of a
louche life rather than its carnal desires.
In fact, the set design’s emphasis on
superficiality over nails-in-the-flesh
depravity served as a metaphor for this
latest rendition of Laclos’s novel. This was
more a Watteau painting come to life—and
less of Fragonard’s The Swing, where the
woman pushed on a swing by a priest opens
her legs to her lover while high in the air.
And yet if one found oneself subconsciously
yearning for the de Sadean viciousness of
the 1987 production, there was the
mitigating circumstance of witnessing these
deceitful scenes mirrored in perfect
symmetry on the highly reflective black
lacquered floorboards. Every fold in every
shimmering gown perfectly reproduced, as if
by Ingres, for a viewer’s delectation—and as
if to remind us yet again that beneath a
glittering surface lie treacherous waters.
So was it as good as what I’d remembered?
Perhaps more interesting is how the passage
of time enables one to comprehend more fully
the Machiavellian undertones in the pursuit
of love. At play’s end, it’s Madame de
Merteuil who’s still standing—but is she
actually the winner in Hampton’s retelling
of Laclos’s lovers—or merely the survivor?
|
