The Last Seduction.(Les Liaisons Dangereuses)(Theater review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Laura Linney and Ben Daniels play a high-stakes game of sexual one-upmanship in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, writes Adam Green.

When it comes to using sex as a weapon, few characters in dramatic literature wield it with such lethal precision as the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's brilliant dissection of carnal gamesmanship among the upper classes of the ancien regime. Based on the 1782 epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, it brought a wicked jolt of energy to Broadway in 1987, with a diamantine Lindsay Duncan and a lubricious Alan Rickman in the lead roles. (Glenn Close and John Malkovich starred in Stephen Frears's 1988 film adaptation.) This month, Laclos and Hampton's sybaritic aristocrats return in the beguiling persons of Laura Linney and Ben Daniels, as the Roundabout Theater Company's revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses opens on Broadway.

The story revolves around a bet between Merteuil, an icy, manipulative beauty with a talent for destruction, and her former lover Valmont, a compulsive womanizer with a watchmaker's insight into what makes a woman tick. Merteuil promises Valmont a night of frolic in the boudoir if he can talk the virtuous Madame de Tourvel into bed, setting off an elaborate chess match, with human beings as the pawns. Along the way, Valmont deflowers an underage convent girl, blackmails a comely servant, and puts his prize conquest through the emotional wringer; but when he unexpectedly falls in love, the endgame turns deadly.

Fresh from her wrenching, Academy Award--nominated performance in The Savages, Linney returns to the stage in a play that she first saw on Broadway as a Juilliard drama student. "I had never seen something that was classically period yet had such a modern sensibility to it," she says. "It was just electric." At the time, the play seemed to have been tailor-made for the Bonfire of the Vanities era in which it was written, but ruthlessness never goes out of style. "The basics of life--love, hate, jealousy, greed, desire, power--don't change," Linney says. "Oh, and sex--that's certainly one of those basics."

At first glance, Linney, who specializes in emotional transparency, might not seem a natural to play a protofeminist "virtuoso of deceit." But her director, Rufus Norris, sees beyond her vulnerability. "There's a kind of openness and warmth, which invites you in," he says. "But she's got the potential to be steely as well. This is not going to be a delicate little drawing-room play. It's full of blood, and she completely has that."

Norris has become one of the most sought-after English stage directors by striking at the jugular in such London productions as Festen, a hair-raising adaptation of the 1998 Dogme film, and Cabaret, a revival of the Kander and Ebb musical that finds new shades of black at its dark heart. Despite a lukewarm reception for Festen on Broadway, he is ready to take a second shot at New York. "It was quite a harsh learning curve, that," Norris says. "But your friends always like you more when you fail occasionally."