Les Liaisons Dangereuses review – love is a fight for power in this bold staging

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was serving as an artillery officer while writing his epistolary novel about a cold game of seduction in the salons of 18th-century France which backfires on its conniving architects. It shows: love is a fight for power and control in his story, every bit as strategic as a military campaign.

Popularly known through the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich (and also the teen version of it, 1999’s Cruel Intentions), this production is directed by Marianne Elliott and uses an adaptation by Christopher Hampton – whose play of the novel, first staged in 1985, was also the basis for the film starring Close.

The intention of Choderlos de Laclos’ novel was to expose the dissolute soul of the upper classes. So it features aristocratic widow and arch Machiavel, the Marquise de Merteuil (Lesley Manville), and society rake, Vicomte de Valmont (Aidan Turner), constructing a web of sexual deceits.

The Marquise’s wager – for him to seduce young Cécile de Volanges (Hannah van der Westhuysen, full of giggles and guilelessness) and the pious Madame de Tourvel (Monica Barbaro) for sport – backfires when he finds himself falling in love.

Together, they are deliciously horrible, although it is Manville (who played Cecile in the play’s original staging) that steals the show. She looks queenly in magnificent ornate dress, its vivid red denoting the bloodsport of her scheme.

She is by turns the effervescent social butterfly, the coolly deceiving manipulator and ruthless sexual predator. A woman who “was born to dominate the opposite sex and avenge her own”, the contained rage burns off her in the final scenes with Valmont as she declares war.

Turner as Valmont is an Irish-accented serial seducer, louche and playful rather than truly dangerous: an affable rake who does not summon Malkovich’s snake-like menace. His seduction scenes do gather in power, though, especially in his ravishing of Cecile, when he regards her as a morsel to be eaten.

But it is when he is forced to give up Madame de Tourvel, on the Marquise’s instruction (repeating the horrifying line “It’s beyond my control”), that he finally drops his playfulness and becomes truly tragic.

Barbaro, making her London stage debut as Madame de Tourvel, is first a stiff, featureless picture of purity in buttoned-up gown and virginal whites but grows in the role as his lover, first exhilarated by her love and then shamed by it.

Sexual seduction and conquest is presented in choreographed movement here alongside the spoken scenes. An ensemble of dancers intermittently swirl on and off stage. It is an innovative, if high stakes, metaphor for seduction as a contact sport and looks beautiful as they tango, swish and sway.

But it is pretty rather than passionate or alluring in the lesser charged first-half of this production, not fevered or sexy enough. It takes on a more prowling, combative quality later on – such as when Madame de Tourvel is ambushed by her growing desire for Valmont while she prays, when an ensemble of men stretch towards her.

At the end too, after Valmont has wrought his revenge on the Marquise, movement carries the threat. The charge is late coming, but highly effective by the end.

There is a sleek modernity to Rosanna Vize’s ravishing set design that bears a ‘Bridgerton’ aesthetic in its combination of period and contemporary elements.

A strap of 18th century erotic etchings is wrapped around the set to foreshadow the sexual decadence, along with a mirrored backdrop that reflects this narcissistic strata of high society back to themselves.

They are dressed like peacocks in satins, silks and sequins, with Natalie Roar’s vivid costumes glinting and bouncing off the mirrors.

A moral story at its core, the story builds to the mutual destruction of both its central villains, by which time this stylish production has finally found its dark, menacing heart.

At the National Theatre, London, until 6 June.