DIRECTOR'S NOTE
What a thrill it is to help bring to life such a lavish period piece, set in the Age of Enlightenment in the luxurious City of Lights, while also staging a work of theatre that tells a cautionary tale of as much relevance and contention as that of its first depiction 244 years ago.
Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985) is a stage adaptation of Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos’s scandalous eighteenth-century novel. First published in Paris in 1782, it famously sold out within a few days and caused an outrage. The novel was considered “dangerous” well into the nineteenth century and was shunned for its “revolting immorality” (Stone, 1961).
The book is an epistolary work of fiction, constructed entirely from letters written by one character to another. In it, Laclos claims merely to be the “editor” (while also adopting the persona of the “publisher”), presenting a narrative created through the sequencing of letters that reportedly came into his possession. Set in the mid-1780s, on the brink of the French Revolution of 1789, it offers a window into the luxurious, opulent world of the aristocracy, who were exceedingly wealthy, powerful, and excessively idle.
What was so contentious in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and I would argue, remains so today—is the depiction of the characters Merteuil and Valmont. They are charismatic, likeable, generous, and engaging, and so adept in their practice of deceit and cruelty that the reader and audience alike may question whether it is the characters’ immorality that is the problem, the author’s, or indeed their own. Can we be so easily drawn into the worlds of such people? Can those with power be so skilled at deceiving us? And what is it in society or in human nature that enables people to commit monstrous acts against others—and should they ever be allowed to get away with them?
Hampton’s play is set in salons and bedrooms in hotels and châteaux in and around Paris, spanning from late summer (August) to winter (New Year’s Eve) of 1785. It is an extravagant tale of revenge, deceit, game-playing, hypocrisy, and sexual intrigue among the French aristocracy. Its two central characters engage in a game of human chess, using manipulation and seduction in a conspiracy to corrupt a young woman as revenge against a former lover, alongside a conquest to seduce and discard a pious married woman purely for pleasure and entertainment.
I am most drawn to theatre that offers a rich sensory experience alongside intellectual and emotional engagement for an audience. I believe Les Liaisons Dangereuses possesses rich theatricality, while also posing contentious and contemporary questions about human behaviour and social power—questions I hope will titillate, carbonate, and stimulate thought.
So, join us in Paris in 1785—but be warned. This is a dangerous world. If you choose to enter the game, you must win… or die.
—Lainie Hart
Click here to book for A Masterclass in Rehearsal Process Sun 8 March 10-12
Text cited
Stone, Lawrence. "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640." Past & Present, no. 28, 1961, pp. 41–80.
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON
Christopher Hampton was born in 1946 in the Azores - his father was a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable and Wireless, and he moved around frequently, including visiting Aden, Yemen, Cairo and Alexandria. During the Suez Crisis in 1956 his family had to flee Egypt overnight, leaving their possessions behind. On returning to the UK he went to an independent boarding, Lancing College, with one of his contemporaries being David Hare. He went on to Oxford, with his first play, “When did you last see my mother”, about adolescent homosexuality, first performed at the Oxford University Dramatic Society, getting a transfer first to the Royal Court then to the West end in 1966, making him the youngest playwright in the modern era to have a play performed in the West End. From 1968 to 1970 he became Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court, presenting “Total Eclipse” in 1968 about the poets and lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and “The Philanthropist” in 1970 getting a four year run on the West end and winning the Evening Standard award for Best Comedy. His first produced film, an adaptation of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” was filmed in 1973 with Anthony Hopkins and Claire Bloom.
In 1985 he adapted Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel “Les Liasons Dangereuses” for the Royal Shakespeare Company – it starred Alan Rickman as Valmont, Lindsay Duncan as Merteuil and Juliet Stevenson as Madame de Tourvel. Originally performing at the Other Place in Stratford, it transferred to the intimate Pit studio at the Barbican and won the Evening Standard award for Best Play and the Lawrence Olivier award for best new play. Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman transferred to the Broadway production in 1987, with the production winning the 1987 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. Hampton adapted it for screen, directed by Stephen Frears, starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman, Peter Capaldi and Keanu Reeves. It won best Adapted Screenplay at the 61st Academy Awards. It was revived in 2016 at the Donmar Warehouse with Dominic West and Janet McTeer – this production was filmed for NT Live. A 2026 production is running at the National Theatre starring Leslie Manville and Aiden Turner from March until June and will be shown on NT Live later this year.
Since the 1990s he has created the English translations for French Dramatists Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller, including translations of “Art”, “God of Carnage” and “The Father” (winning another Academy Award for the film adaptation of “The Father”). He also wrote the script and lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Sunset Boulevard”, wrote and directed films of “Carrington” (1995) and “The Secret Agent (1996) along with writing the Academy Award nominated script of “Atonement” (2007). In the 2020 New Years Honours he was knighted for his services to drama.
PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Born into a bourgeois family, Laclos served in the Seven years war, with postings in Strasbourg, Genoble and Bescanon and a promotion to captain in 1771. He became bored with artillery garrison duties and began devoting his free time to writing – first with several light poems, then writing an opera comique (premiering in 1777 to an audience including Marie Antoinette). The same year he established a new artillery school in Valence, which would later include Napoleon Bonaparte amongst its students.
Sent to Ille d’Aix to work on the construction of fortifications against the British in 1779, he instead spent most of his time writing “Les Liasons Dangereuses”. The novel was written as an epistlatory novel with the story told in letters, with many of the characters displaying noticeably different sides of their personality depending on who they were writing to – the first time this kind of deception had appeared in a novel. It was published in 4 volumes in 1872 and sold widely. The novel has had multiple adaptations including three operas (one American, one Belgian, one Italian), five ballets (two English, one American, one Czech, one Australian), eight movies (including three in French, one Chinese and one South Korean, and the 1999 updated film version “Cruel Intentions”), ten tv series (three French, one Slovak, one Columbian, one Brazilian, one south Korean and three American including two attempts at a “Cruel Intentions” tv series)
He left the army in 1788 and joined the service of the Duke of Orleans, carrying out diplomatic activity for him – though he was to switch to the Revolutionary Army as commissar of war. During the reign of terror he was briefly arrested due to possible support for the claims of the Duke of Orleans, and was not freed until July 1794. He joined Napoleon Bonaparte’s party and was made commander of chief of Reserve Artillery in Italy in 1803. He died shortly afterwards, probably of dysentery and malaria, in the former convent of St Francis of Assisi at Taranto.
—Compiled by Simon Tolhurst
