He layers some of his eventual rout into the earlier scenes, all but ceding the stage to McTeer. Despite Schreiber’s height, swagger and masculine force, his Valmont is no match for Merteuil. There’s a saturnine, slightly defeated air to his alcoholic Valmont. This production has no doubt that Merteuil will win, though at some cost to herself, and Schreiber seems to sense this. This is an astute and intellectually provocative approach, but it doesn’t always serve the rather more salacious script and has the undesired effect of making a grandly hyped battle of the sexes into a first-round KO. Observations about gender dynamics (“Our sex has few enough advantages, you may as well make the most of those you have” “Men enjoy the happiness they feel we can only enjoy the happiness we give”) are afforded particular weight. Rourke offers a feminist reading of the work, one in which the roles women play, by force and by choice, are closely examined. What’s the point of all those bodices if they won’t be ripped?Įven the set seems rather somber, a distressed chateau that suggests the ways in which sexual gamesmanship and societal manipulation continue from pre-revolutionary France to the present. Rourke and some of the actors take the script so seriously they sometimes forget to have much fun with it. That revival felt trivial this one feels a little more ponderous. Liaisons was revived on Broadway fairly recently, in a 2008 production that starred Laura Linney and Ben Daniels and did little to surmount audience memories of Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in the stage debut or Glenn Close and John Malkovich in the Stephen Frears film. “Love and revenge,” the Marquise entices Valmont. If he can also manage to deflower a silly teenager just released from a convent (Elena Kampouris), so much the better. Adversaries, comrades and former lovers, they bet that if Valmont can win the affections of the notoriously prim Madame de Tourvel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, of Borgen fame), the Marquise will once again grant him her favors. A story both immoral and moralizing, it concerns the cerebral and erotic duel between the Marquise de Merteuil (McTeer) and the Vicomte de Valmont (Schreiber).