Is it the production or the play?
That’s what I always wonder when I am underwhelmed by a new staging of a play that I once thought was terrific.
Current case in point — Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which knocked me out when it debuted on Broadway in the 1980s, but left me ice-cold at the Roundabout Theatre last Sunday.
The play’s portrait of two French aristocrats who, for social sport, like to seduce and abandon prudes and virgins seemed diabolically evil and sexy as played by Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in the 1980s.
The 1988 movie version was fun, too, with what might be Glenn Close’s best film performance ever and Michelle Pfeiffer so poignant as the married religious woman destroyed by John Malkovich’s seduction.
On Sunday, however, the antics of Laura Linney and Ben Daniels in the same roles seemed almost silly.
Wouldn’t their friends (and enemies) catch on to the obvious manipulations of this dastardly duo, I thought to myself, as I sat through close to three hours of sexual chess-playing. And who would fall under the spell of such an obviously two-faced woman (as played by Linney)?
It’s hard to base a whole play on the machinations of evil manipulators, but Rickman and Duncan pulled it off all those years ago and Close was a spectacular monster in the movie version.
Laura Linney is a wonderful actress, but I never got caught up in her character’s dangerous games — her heart didn’t seem to be in it, so she wasn’t really scary or funny. Linney’s work reminded me of Meryl Streep’s performance in the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” — a pale echo of that horrifying woman Angela Lansbury played in the original movie.
Do American actresses try to “understand” evil and then wind up softening it?
Or, is “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” just one of those stories that becomes tiresome when you’ve heard it a few times before?
