Christopher Hampton's play 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', based on the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, was first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985 with a cast including Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan, Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw. In that production the part of the naïve teenager Cécile de Volanges was played by Lesley Manville. 41 years later, Lesley Manville takes the lead as the Marquise de Merteuil in Marianne Elliott's new production of the play for the National Theatre, which we saw in a NT Live screening at the Rufus Centre in Flitwick on Wednesday. Lesley Manville is wonderful, as is her partner in crime Aidan Turner as the Vicomte de Valmont who plays his part with a lupine glee - like the wolf in Red Riding Hood. Marianne Elliott's production is on a grand scale, with an extensive cast, wonderfully choreographed by Tom Jackson Greaves. But I think the play worked better on the intimate stage of the Donmar Warehouse in Josie Rourke's 2016 production (reviewed here in January 2016). Christopher Hampton's script is delicious, with its Oscar Wilde-like reversal of conventional morals, but the seduction scenes now feel very uncomfortable, the perpetrators' eventual comeuppance never excusing the damage done to their victims.
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