Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos began writing his masterpiece, the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, on an isolated island in the Bay of Biscay, describing it to a friend as ‘something extraordinary, intriguing, something that will resonate throughout the world even when I am no longer here’.
Almost two hundred years later, Laclos’s novel was taken up by the British playwright Christopher Hampton, who created one of the most celebrated literary adaptations in modern theatre and film. Stephen Frears’s screen version, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, left an indelible mark on popular culture and earned Hampton the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
On the eve of the French Revolution, in the autumn and winter of the 1780s, moving between salons, bedrooms and aristocratic residences in and around Paris, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont set in motion an erotic war suspended between desire and cruelty. Around them gathers an intricate web of seduction and manipulation: the young and curious Cécile, the inexperienced Chevalier Danceny, and the seemingly virtuous and far from naive Madame de Tourvel.
In both Laclos and Hampton, erotic tension serves as a means of exploring relationships of power, domination and conquest in a world that does not yet realise it stands on the brink of disappearance. In the background, the guillotine is already being prepared. Beneath the games of seduction and control stand protagonists caught between the fear of love, the search for meaning, and an almost desperate hunger for life. Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been performed continuously since its premiere in 1985, repeatedly asking what lies beneath tightly laced corsets, how much truth there is between the sheets, and what remains of desire at a moment when life itself seems to be losing its meaning.
The production will be directed by Janusz Kica, whose work has long been held in high regard by Zagreb audiences.
