Sex is a weapon of manipulation. At least the two rivals in the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses would have you believe it is. But the play—Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation of the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel—is much more than that, says director Fran Gebhard.
“The play is set in the 1780s, just before the French revolution,” says Gebhard. “Hampton wrote it in the 1980s, just before the turn of the century, and, for him, there were correlations there. For us, being far past that, those correlations are different.”
Costume designer Graham McMonagle has incorporated both elegance and style into the costumes, with complicated layers, subtle colour changes, and glittery hand-painted designs. McMonagle succeeds in bringing out what Gebhard calls a performative aspect, which was very pronounced in the upper classes—where reputation was everything—of the time.
“My idea is that the performative aspect, the soul, the interior of the person, there are layers on top of that, which we represent by the clothing,” says Gebhard.
Gebhard says that the two aforementioned rivals in the play are evil, manipulative, upper-class villains. But they’re villains she hopes the audience will love.
“They’re verbally dexterous with one another,” says Gebhard. “You can feel that there’s a great love between these two people and if they could put their egos aside, they should end up as a couple. But they can’t. They must keep jousting—or perhaps fencing is a better analogy, because there is fencing in the end.”
This idea of layering is further represented, more subtly, in the set design. Gebhard describes the furniture as being somewhat realistic, but the shades make it seem like a “kind of cocoon world.”
“We have beautiful ecru silk as a backdrop,” says Gebhard, “drapery to mirror the idea of layering. You don’t see it too much, but you can see there’s a big swoop, and there’s some layers of curtain, and there’s another curtain that’s further downstage.”
When she was choosing this play, Gebhard was unaware that it was being played in Broadway and London; she says that this shows that she isn’t the only one who sees the timeliness of the revival and the relevance in today’s world.
“I feel that the audience will be able to relate the stars of this upper class to some of the people who have their 15 minutes of fame today,” says Gebhard, “Not that they’re necessarily evil; I’m not saying that. I’m saying that they are manipulative in creating a performative aspect of their life. That then becomes so interesting that their life is their theatre.”
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Until Saturday, November 26
(pre-show lecture at 7 pm on Friday, November 18)
$15 for students,
UVic’s Phoenix Theatre
finearts.uvic.ca/theatre