Arts

It’s easy to see why morally ambiguous aristos never go out of style.

For Lesley Manville, the National Theatre’s new revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which opened in London last month and runs through June 6, marks a full-circle moment. In 1985 she played the young, virginal Cécile Volanges in the original Royal Shakespeare Company production of Christopher Hampton’s play about a group of tightly corseted, ruthlessly depraved 18th-­century French aristocrats.

More than 40 years later, and fresh from Broadway, where she received raves in Oedipus, Manville plays the Marquise de Merteuil, whose scheming—and feverish letter writing—enmeshes Cécile and the devoutly religious Madame de Tourvel in a tangle of exploitative game-playing orchestrated by Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. (Rivals star Aidan Turner plays Valmont in London.)

Originally adapted by Hampton from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel, the play was also turned into a 1988 hit movie, Dangerous Liaisons, which featured a cavalcade of powdered faces, luxuriant wigs, and whispered poison—and standout performances by Glenn Close as Merteuil and John Malkovich as Valmont.

Hampton, who modestly gives credit for Liaisons’ success to Laclos’s novel, wrote the play in 1984 hoping it might find a small, niche audience. Its success has been “a source of great pleasure,” Hampton tells T&C. (For the National Theatre production, he has rewritten elements of Cécile’s and Madame de Tourvel’s parts “to not make them such victims.”)

The National production is part of a Liaisons revival. An upcoming Netflix adaptation will reportedly be set in 2025 among a group of British aristocrats and arrivistes; the French television series The Seduction, based on Laclos’s novel, premiered on HBO Max in November; and the 2022 TV reimagining on Starz even featured Manville in the role of Merteuil. Liaisons’ reemergence is timely: Its privileged characters’ predatory cruelty has a real-world echo in the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

Of Liaisons’ enduring popularity, Hampton says, “I think it is particularly narratively satisfying, and it deals with sensitive subjects that even today are rarely dealt with in such a frank and open way.”