Les Liaisons Dangereuses still seduces

It is a strange thing that theatre can do: stretch the sense of space, and with it, the reach of a subject. Last week, I left Les Liaisons Dangereuses convinced that I had been not in the boxy Lyttelton but in the wide expanse of the Olivier.

In the 1970s, Christopher Hampton struggled to persuade theatres that there was a play to be made from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel. The tale of 18th-century courtesan cruelty – in which two former lovers assuage their boredom by devising sexual intrigues to entrap the pure – was, after all, written in the form of letters and thought to be inherently undramatic.

When eventually staged in 1985, the play was a sellout, but it was thought it would never work in a big space – that it needed the edge that came from an audience feeling they were eavesdropping. Larger stagings – and film adaptations – have proved that wrong. As to a large extent does Marianne Elliott’s production. It is a leisurely evening but full of savour.

Hampton’s richly epigrammatic dialogue – eyebrow-arching, insinuation-drenched, nasty and graceful – is in very good mouths. Lesley Manville is superb: dainty, lethal and finally lost. She swishes on magnificent in scarlet but turns rodent-like as she spits out commands from tiny puckered lips. She moves in an instant from snicker to snarl. In another instant, she simply fades. In front of an imaginary mirror, she is alongside (though not in the same room as) the ingenue whose corruption she has secured and by whom she will eventually be supplanted.

In seconds, the power between the women pivots. Manville, suddenly catching sight of herself as no longer young and luscious, piles on layers of clothing and jewellery as if she were stacking shelves. Beside her, the younger woman peels off her garments, seeming to lose a year and gain in lustre with each discarded item.

In the 1985 production, Manville played the ingenue. The part is now given impressive gusto by Hannah van der Westhuysen, who begins with a giggle that swallows up their face and quakes their body, and ends up glinting and unyielding as flint. These women literally make themselves up. They have no choice. Hampton’s play does not soften their edges: it is the more sympathetic, and feminist, for that. Elliott’s production is the better for not underlining parallels with present-day sex manipulations.

Elliott gives the lie to the old notion that women’s best thing is detail. She goes for the big sweep, the massive effect. Her directorial choices have been daring: she was co-director of War Horse in 2007 and staged The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Her interventions have been bold: she persuaded Stephen Sondheim that two gender swaps in Company would be a good thing and, with Miranda Cromwell, put on Death of a Salesman with an African American cast. When Elliott directed Saint Joan, she got the stage to rear up, sending bodies sliding all over the place. Next year, she will direct Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and has announced the casting: Wicked’s Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande.

Her unifying notion for Les Liaisons Dangereuses is to float the action on dance: with formal measures and, between scenes, undulations by vaguely menacing males. This adds a swell of movement to the evening, though it never quite focuses a mood. The actor it serves best is Aidan Turner, who formerly rippled as Poldark. Turner trained as a dancer, ballroom and Latin, and his sashaying walk has a dance spring.

He uses scenery as apparatus, leaving an arm trailing on the side of a door and swinging back elastically; he skims a book across the room like a Frisbee. John Malkovich – playing opposite Glenn Close in Stephen Frears’s 1988 film– was feral; Turner is more lounge lizard, nonchalantly seductive. He has a lovely counterpoint in Darragh Hand, who plays the male innocent with explosive enthusiasm, moving in the course of the evening from boy scout to toy boy.

That strange stretching of space, as if the viciousness of the plotters is leaking into the air, must in part be credited to designer Rosanna Vize. Still, her set is a mixed blessing. It lands its points like punches. A gigantic, Gherkin-like chandelier; a wraparound frieze of cupids and bare limbs; too-convenient secret chambers. Ostentatious, oppressive wealth; constant sexual titillation; spying and hiding. Ugliness is insufficiently under wraps. Seduction is more verbal than visual in a production that may not gnaw but still has sharp teeth.

Photographs by Sarah Lee

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the Lyttelton, London, until 6 June