January 9, 2004: Hampton, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
January 9, 2004: Hampton, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Playhouse, From the novel by Choderlos de Laclos
The Playhouse has very pleasant associations for me, because I always remember when I go there that, under its earlier name, The Avenue, it was the venue for Shaw’s first commercially successful play, Arms and the Man. Some time back it evidently underwent a rehabilitation, its nether regions turned into a pleasant bar and lounge with many posters and pictures of predominantly Shaw-related plays, including one of Sybil Thorndike as Saint Joan, on her knees, praying.
Pleasant circumstances, then, for a revival of a play I seem to remember seeing in its transfer to the West End from a Royal Shakespeare Company premier. It is a play well worth reviving, and the interview between the author and the current director, Tim Fywell, printed in the program offers an interesting “take” on it — it being Hampton’s impression that both offer what is in effect a broader metaphor for our understanding of human relations that transcends both Laclos’s time and the time, twenty years back, of Hampton’s initial response to Laclos’s novel.
What is striking about this revival is its rather remarkable transparency. Hampton recalls that he had two false starts in writing the play. He first attempted to render Laclos’s characters and the action of the novel in ways that were linguistically “true” to the late eighteenth century (he read Tom Jones and Smollett and tried to imitate the language). Seeing that this only created a useless distancing effect, he then brought it up to date entirely. When that didn’t work either, he created a melding of modern language with the syntax and rhetoric of the period. It was a strategy that worked then and continues to work now, and it is one reason why the play reads in so transparent a way, taking us into the lives and even the psyches of these characters as if they were objectified versions of ourselves, while somehow rendering those realities “in the habits” — not only the costumes, but the ways of linguistic expression — “of the time.”
Hampton and Fywell also speculate over the extent to which the licentious actions and motives of these characters represent our own secret desires to transgress the boundaries of orthodox decency, of acceptable behavior, and so claim from us a fascination and the desire to emulate their lives in behavior that runs at odds with our well-trained morality. We want to be secretly what they are openly, we want to embrace the seemingly amoral behavior that eschews morality and holds pleasure as the highest good, and we want to do so without suffering any consequences. And we want to do this in a context quite free of emotional engagement — which, we know from experience, invariably brings with it consequences of connection with other human beings like ourselves.
In the moral economy of this seemingly amoral play, the character of Madame de Tournel is the pivotal character. In pursuing her seduction, the Vico