Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Director's Note

My director's note is due for the program copy, so I am posting it here:

Director's Note

I first read the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses as a senior in college. I remember discussing the epistolary format, and particularly the narrative positioning of the novel’s two contradictory prefaces.  One preface states that the letters are found objects; the other calls that assertion into question, assessing the contents that follow as “merely a novel.” I also recall intensive analysis of Letter 81, in which the Marquise de Merteuil explains to Valmont how she created herself as a woman who displays vastly different public and private versions of her identity. 

Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation of the 1784 novel by Choderlos de Laclos mostly dispenses with the epistolary format.  Though the characters discuss writing letters, only a handful of letters are read or written on stage.  Instead, Hampton focuses on romantic and sexual gamesmanship.  The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil are libertines who use love and passion in a twisted game designed primarily for their own pleasure.  Other characters are generally pawns in their game, but some are players in their own right.

Our production draws on the idea of games in multiple ways.  The designers have incorporated imagery of playing cards, as well as the playful spirit of the rococo.  The actors’ rehearsal process included developing moments of game-play within the scenes.  In addition to metaphors of games that existed in the eighteenth century, such as chess and tennis, we incorporated contemporary games like Hearts, “Mother, May I,” and “Red Light, Green Light.” 

As a significant text of the Enlightenment era, Les Liaisons dangereuses plays on tensions between reason and sentiment, public and private, the classical and the rococo.  The visual art of eighteenth-century France offers an apt point of contrast.  Merteuil and Valmont might best fit into the world of sexual danger represented in paintings by Fragonard (whose The Bolt was the cover art of the paperback version I read in college), while Tourvel finds more affinity with the domestic simplicity of works by Greuze.  Though the story is steeped in the eighteenth century, Hampton’s play uses modern language, encouraging us to think about the destructive qualities of desire as they exist in the world today.