The London National Theatre Review: Marianne Elliott’s visually ravishing revival turns Christopher Hampton’s masterpiece into an intoxicating dance of love, revenge, and cruelty
By Ross
Our theme for this whirlwind London theatre trip has somehow, organically, become “madness.” It has echoed through nearly every stop on the itinerary, from Equus and Dracula to Romeo and Juliet, Inter Alia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Yet nowhere has madness worn such impeccable manners as it does in Marianne Elliott‘s magnificent and devastating revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Here, insanity arrives dressed in silk, hidden behind powdered faces, charming smiles, and perfectly chosen words, where cruelty becomes an elegant social accomplishment and destruction is performed with exquisite grace.
The Marquise de Merteuil enters masked and draped in red, already commanding the room before she speaks a word. Lesley Manville (Broadway’s Oedipus) understands that the Marquise’s greatest weapon is not seduction but the hidden act of control. The unspoken invitation seems clear: let the dance begin. It is impossible to look anywhere else until another masked figure enters, and the evening’s carefully orchestrated enterprise slowly begins to reveal itself inside the National Theatre‘s Lyttelton. The conversations themselves become acts of intense, elaborate choreography and deception. When Madame de Volanges, played with quietly judgmental precision by Cat Simmons (Donmar’s Natasha, Pierre…), asks, “You receive him?” regarding the arrival of the Vicomte de Valmont, the remark carries the polite sting of social warfare. Manville tosses it back with the effortless confidence of someone who wrote the rules everyone else is still trying to follow.
Christopher Hampton‘s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel has always been a battlefield disguised as a drawing room. But Marianne Elliott (Broadway’s Angels in America) embraces that idea with remarkable invention. Love, revenge, and cruelty become the vocabulary of this society, each word carrying equal weight and equal stabbing pain. The Marquise and Valmont speak the language of seduction while conducting a military campaign against innocence itself. They would never dream of insulting one another directly. The insult lies in the game they invite the other to play. But the Marquise’s game is slightly different than the one Valmont thinks he’s playing. Valmont believes they are playing together against society. The Marquise understands intuitively that they are playing against one another. Like the finest chess players, she is already thinking several moves beyond the board that everyone else can see, with death and ultimate destruction at the end of this checkmate.
Designer Rosanna Vize (Almeida’s Golden Boy) delivers an extraordinary set that embraces the vast Lyttelton stage in a way that feels both expansive and intimate. Massive mirrors revolve, reflecting the action back upon itself, and exposing both the polished surface presented to society and the plain structures hidden behind it. The dual-sided effect is brilliant, serving characters who constantly perform carefully constructed versions of themselves before us, while we become willing voyeurs and active participants. Above them hangs a great circular chandelier that rises and falls throughout the evening like another mask being lifted and lowered over carefully arranged expressions. James Farncombe‘s lighting transforms those visuals into shifting psychological landscapes, while Ian Dickinson‘s sound design for Autograph and Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s atmospheric score ensure that elegance is constantly shadowed by menace. The sumptuous costumes by Natalie Roar (“Magpie“), blending eighteenth-century elegance with unmistakably contemporary fetish influences, deepen that sense that appearance has become another form of manipulation, and a perfect disguise for the enterprise of revenge.
The dance never truly leaves the stage. Tom Jackson Greaves’ choreography weaves between conversations, expressing emotions the characters themselves refuse to acknowledge. At times, these extended movement sequences momentarily slow the dramatic momentum, particularly during the first half, but they also reveal something essential about Elliott’s conception. The inner lives of these characters cannot be trusted to words alone. Their bodies confess what their carefully polished dialogue attempts to conceal.
Aidan Turner (Abbey’s Romeo and Juliet) gives Valmont a performance full of saturnine charm, swagger, and self-assurance. His confidence occasionally leans toward comedy, yet that only reinforces his fatal blindness. He believes himself the master strategist while failing to recognize that he is playing someone else’s game entirely. The chemistry between Turner and Manville crackles with intelligence and power rather than genuine romance. They circle one another like expert chess players who happen to enjoy setting fire to the board.
Their chosen battlefield becomes the young and convent-educated Cécile de Volanges, played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Hannah van der Westhuysen (“Sexy Beast“), and the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, whom Monica Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown“) portrays with remarkable emotional clarity in an elegant stage debut. Barbaro captures the agonizing internal conflict of a woman whose moral certainty gradually dissolves beneath the relentless pressure of desire. Madness arrives here in a quieter disguise. Valmont believes he is merely winning another game, yet what he and the Marquise ultimately engineer is the destruction of genuine virtue itself. Tourvel’s collapse becomes one of the production’s deepest tragedies because she alone seems to believe love exists outside strategy. Standing close beside her in the country air, Gabrielle Drake (Royal Exchange’s The Cherry Orchard) brings warmth and quiet dignity to Madame de Rosemonde. Drake provides one of the few genuine centres of humanity within a world devoted to calculation, offering compassion to Madame de Tourvel at her moment of greatest need.
Perhaps the production’s greatest achievement is the way intimacy survives inside such an enormous theatrical space. Conversations become duels. Seductions become negotiations. Servants linger at the edges of scenes, silently witnessing and perhaps even colluding with their masters’ schemes. Elliott never sensationalizes the exploitation at the story’s heart, particularly where Cécile is concerned. Instead, she presents it with an ugly realism that strips away any temptation to romanticize these manipulations.
Manville reveals her first transformation when Valmont insists upon the reward he believes he has earned, and the Marquise answers with a devastating and powerful chill that finally strips away her carefully maintained mask. It’s sharply defined and executed brilliantly, yet that revelation proves merely the beginning. The evening’s final and greatest transformation comes when society itself discovers what lies beneath that mask. As letters are raised one by one, exposing the truth before the very world she has manipulated, her entire identity begins to collapse. Elliott stages the moment with breathtaking theatrical precision. Most astonishing of all is the realization that Cécile, dressed with a striking modernity that signals a shifting balance of power beyond the confines of this story, has become the unexpected new choreographer of this final dance. In that moment, her destruction is complete, and we watch almost aghast as the master of deception becomes its final victim.
From its opening dance to its devastating conclusion, this revival proved invigorating and captivating. Throughout this remarkable theatrical journey, the returning word “madness” keeps finding its place in different disguises. Here it arrives wearing velvet and lace, smiling politely while extending an invitation to play. Lesley Manville’s Marquise accepts that invitation with terrifying confidence, believing she understands every rule. Watching the greatest player at the table discover that someone else has quietly rewritten the rules made for one of the most thrilling evenings of theatre I experienced on this remarkable trip.
