Dangerous Liaisons

The first performance of Christopher Hampton’s sleek, skilled, witty adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ novel occurred 203 years after the novel’s publication in 1872.  De Laclos (1741-1803), a French army artillery officer, was posted to an island in the Bay of Biscay.  Bored and at the age of forty, he decided to write a novel – as you do.  It would be his first and only novel, but, as he wrote to a friend, he hoped it would be ‘something out of the ordinary… something that would resound around the world even after I had left it.’  He succeeded: his novel has scarcely been out of print ever since.  It consists entirely of letters exchanged between characters - and yet it displays extraordinary psychological acuity, delicious irony and, by implication of course, powerful moral outrage. It is also, quite crucially and I think intentionally, a profoundly feminist work. 

All the great speeches (arias?) of the piece (for instance, Mertueil’s extended number on how she ‘invented’ herself as a woman) are distilled versions of de Laclos.  In eighteen scenes of masterful economy and clarity, Mr Hampton dramatises a vicious battle of the sexes, twisted and poisoned by the good old ‘double standard’, hypocrisy and cruelty.  The 18^th century setting, the frills and furbelows, brocades and elaborate manners are a screen through which we see people not so different to our contemporaries.

Hampton’s play, despite its undeniable wit and comic moments, is not a comedy.  The two central characters, Merteuil and Valmont, reduce people to playthings, counters in their displaced struggle for power over each other.  It features the virtual rape of an innocent  (how topical) and a woman driven to such despair that she dies.  If the play has a central theme it is in a line of Merteuil’s ‘…vanity and happiness are incompatible.’  Beside this, there is the implicit thread of ‘women beware women’.

This production is by Little Ones Theatre, a self-described ‘queer collective’, which aims to create ‘camp, kitsch, and erotically charged theatrical events… bold, risqué and always comedic, subverting classical theatre conventions’.  A program note for this production of Dangerous Liaisons says that ‘Little Ones Theatre will bring its unique brand of high camp to this lethal drawing room comedy.’ 

There you are: ‘lethal drawing room comedy.’  That is how director Stephen Nicolazzo and his colleagues have chosen to see it and that is what they attempt to present.  The question is, does this take on the text and the ‘queer theatre’ approach enhance it, subvert it, destroy it, or turn it into something else entirely?

First off, it should be said that if you’re unfamiliar with Hampton’s text (which is not altered, just slightly cut, and much of it survives the high campery) or believe that the moral outrages in the text can be subjects for amusement, then this really can be a very entertaining evening.  It is funny, comedy or not, and the audience was clearly having a good time.  It may be queer theatre, but it is certainly very physical, high-energytheatre.  Directed within an inch of their lives, the cast’s movements are skillfully choreographed, stylized and exaggerated.  The set design by Eugyeene Teh of golden drapes, gold floor and a bare three pieces of gold Baroque furniture is striking.  Her costumes, together with Tessa Leigh Wolfenbuttel Pitt, are all coordinated in several shades of pink and are attractive and perfectly in keeping with this version of the play.

It is, however, with ‘this version of the play’, that I have some doubts and niggles – although I know that what I may doubt and niggle at is probably done absolutely on purpose.  But is it really ‘queer theatre’ to cast Janine Watson as the male sexual predator Valmont?  Ms Watson is an attractive performer, but her performance is uneven – or perhaps she’s struggling with the breakneck pace at which nearly all scenes are played, so that key lines are swallowed or garbled.  In any case, it was not clear – at least to me – how this casting made a comment on the character, or ‘subverted’ a convention.  On the contrary, the central power struggle between the ‘masculine’ Valmont and the ‘feminine’ Merteuil – in which she is the Pyrrhic victor – is vitiated.  Alexandra Aldrich as Merteuil moves beautifully and does hauteur well, but there’s not a trace of sensuality – and the hauteur and the ‘comedy’ overcome some key speeches too – such as the one mentioned above. 

In fact, in a play in which sex is central, I’d have to question just how ‘erotically charged’ the proceedings are – despite all the women except Ms Aldrich getting to wear transparent tops.  Valmont seduces Madame de Tourvel (Brigid Gallacher), but forget seeing her succumb to passion.  There’s none on show.  Anything overtly sexual – a hand up a crotch for instance – is tentative and half-hearted.  (Being Australians, after all, even ‘queer theatre’ can’t portray sex.)  Catherine Davies, as Valmont’s manservant Azolan and doubling up as the courtesan Emily (playing both pretty much the same) works very hard at being ‘sexy’, so hard that it’s almost parody – but maybe that’s the point.  Amanda McGregor plays Cécile, not as an innocent just out of a convent, but as an idiot – but okay, she’s funny and so, most unfortunately in the current context, is her rape. 

The only male actor in the show, Tom Dent, is constrained by having to play Danceney, not as a rather weak and dim musician, but a wet-lipped booby. I guess that too is intentional.  But what is the intention behind playing kindly, world-weary but wise Madame de Rosemonde as hearty and bustling butch complete with fat cigar?  Interestingly, the style becomes suddenly downright conventional in the little scene in which Rosemonde (Joanne Sutton) explains life and men to Madame de Tourvel.  The breathless pace and stylized movements go on hold and the scene is one where, for about the first time in the evening, one feels something and realizes that Ms Sutton and Ms Gallacher can do more than clown.  

Perhaps Mr Nicolazzo couldn’t think of a way to camp up that particular scene.  He has no such problem with the fatal duel between Valmont and Danceney.  To pumping rock music, the two of them chase each other around the stage, off the stage and on again and, in case that gets tedious (and it does) Ms Davies, here as Azolan but with breasts, treats us to some wild disco dancing.  And the point is…?  Consequently, Valmont’s decision to run onto Danceney’s sword, his dying words (as camped up as dinner theatre) and his death don’t matter much, which, in turn, undercuts Merteuil’s frozen doll (which, per se, Ms Aldrich does well) in the last scene.    

It is possible that I have misunderstood the production’s intentions here, but overall, I’d have to say that the queer theatre approach, in this instance, doesn’t enhance or subvert Mr Hampton’s text.  Instead it only trivializes it.  I detect no coherent point or argument to the approach and the unrelenting attempts to camp it up and be funny look random, misguided and rather shallow.  Don’t worry about that though.  It’s fun.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Sarah Walker