Conceived and
Directed by
Adam Cooper
and
Lez Brotherston
Music composed by
Philip Feeney
Choreographed by
Adam Cooper
Designed by
Lez Brotherston
Orchestra
London Musici
Vicomte
de Valmont
Adam Cooper
Madame
de Tourval
Sarah Wildor
Marquise
de Merteuil
Sarah Barron
Madame
de Rosamonde
Marilyn Cutts
Cecile Volanges
Helen Dixon
Chevalier Danceny
Damian Jackson
Madame
de Volanges
Yolande Yorke-Edgell
Comte
de Gercourt
Richard Curto
Prevan
Barnaby Ingram
|
Les Liaisons
Dangereuses
Sadler's Wells
21 July - 14 August 2005
This is not a mere translation from book to dance drama, but a transfiguration: the assemblage of talent that realises the dark and disturbing Liaisons Dangereuses as ballet has brilliantly narrated the tempestuous cross-currents of emotion that make the tale, to breathtaking effect.
There are four elements in this success. One is Philip Feeney's music, which wonderfully evokes the story's milieu - both the eighteenth century and a timeless universe of love, lust, desire, betrayal and anguish. The second is Lez Brotherston's design, which superbly shapes the space into mirrored Versailles-like rooms, cleverly transformed for each scene by the minimum of necessary furnishings. The third is Adam Cooper's powerful choreography, which by the accessible means of mainly classical movement, ingeniously supplemented, tells the tale without missing a pulse. And the last is superb dancing by the nine-strong company, with the magnetic presence of Adam Cooper's Vicomte de Valmont at their head.
Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, once lovers and still bound together by threads of desire and dangerous mutual gaming - in both senses: of games and of betting, daring, setting stakes and odds - enter a perilous contract of revenge. The Marquise wishes to punish the Comte de Gercourt, a recent admirer, for neglecting her in pursuit of marriage with the virginal young Cecile Volanges. Her tactic is to persuade Valmont to deflower Cecile. At first he is not interested, having set his sights on different game: he stakes his reputation as a seducer on an attempt to get the virtuous Madame de Tourval into bed. The Marquise teases him by saying she does not believe he can succeed, and demands proof positive. And she also promises him an erotic reward if he will take Cecile's virginity. He accepts; the plot is set.
Valmont tricks his way into Cecile's bedchamber and compels her to submit to his embraces, half by blackmail and half by rape. He also at last succeeds in making Madame de Tourval fall in love with him - but at the cost of falling in love with her himself. His conquest of her anguishes him, and to save her from himself he tries to repudiate her. She, mortally hurt, in turn rejects him when he tries to tell her of his mistake. And mortified by her loss of honour, she kills herself. With nothing left to live for, Valmont runs fatally onto the sword of a young admirer of Cecile whom his seduction of Cecile has angered and who has challenged him to a duel. The Marquise de Merteuil, for the most part triumphing in the discomfiture and degradation of all around her, is stricken by losing Valmont at last: and the dark, despairing, excoriating drama ends with her terrible grief.
It is a sexy story, and it is sexily told here: there are no holds barred in this depiction of passion and both its expression and its extremes. The rape scene that ends Act I leaves the audience shaken, as does the tense denouement of the whole, when Valmont, unable to bear what he has done to Madame de Tourval and perhaps also Cecile, but anyway disgusted by the dirty game he and the Marquise have played, chooses the point of a rapier as his last lover.
Adam Cooper has great physical presence. He dominates the stage, brooding and seductive, taking the audience with him when he descends from confidence in his mastery of women to uncertainty and pain when eroticism has been transformed by his success with Madame de Tourval into something almost too large for him to grasp. His Valmont is brilliantly partnered by each of Sarah Wildor as the beautiful, pure, tormented Madame de Tourval, Sarah Barron as the demonic and vengeful Marquise de Merteuil - a wonderful performance, this - and Helen Dixon as the enchanting young Cecile Volanges.
When art feels the need to overspill boundaries, it does so with impunity - but not always with success. If there is a question mark in this production it is that Marilyn Cutts's Madame de Rosamonde provides a touch of opera for the sake of information, and not everyone will agree that it is necessary. At one of the drama's highest moments, when Valmont sees Madame de Tourval turn a poniard against herself, he shouts out 'No!', and somehow that works, even though it is a case of the spoken word cutting through the heart of a ballet. But the singing does not sit so naturally in the whole, which it might do if there were more of it; as it is, it is merely a small, unexpected and superfluous patch.
Measured against the rest, this is a very small cavil. Adam Cooper, Lez Brotherston and Philip Feeney have made a really good, perhaps a great, work of ballet here, which deserves to be a permanent addition to the repertoire of dance theatre.
AC Grayling
|
