In a West End brimming with star vehicles and glossy revivals, few pairings feel as combustible – or as perversely alluring – as Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in a new staging of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. This latest adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel of sexual intrigue and social warfare arrives at a moment when questions of power, consent, and reputation are under renewed scrutiny, casting fresh light on a classic tale of aristocratic manipulation. With Manville as the calculating Marquise de Merteuil and Turner as her charismatic co-conspirator, the Vicomte de Valmont, londontheatre.co.uk’s review examines how this production navigates the fine line between seduction and cruelty, and whether these two magnetic leads can reanimate one of drama’s most infamous partnerships for a contemporary audience.
Magnetic performances dissecting Lesley Manville and Aidan Turners seductive power games
What makes this revival sizzle is not the opulence of the costumes or the burnish of the candlelight, but the way Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner turn manipulation into an art form. Manville’s Marquise wields civility like a scalpel, her every tilt of the head and clipped consonant a strategic strike. Turner counters with a languid, feline Valmont, whose easy charm is a mask for razor‑sharp calculation. Together,they build scenes that feel less like conversations and more like tournaments,where the prize is domination and the weapon is desire. Their chemistry is electric yet icy, a connection forged not in romance but in mutual recognition of the other’s cruelty.
Their interplay unfolds as a meticulous choreography of glances, pauses, and calculated silences, giving the production a thrilling sense of danger. Director and cast create a seductive battlefield where intimacy and cruelty overlap:
- Voice – shifts from velvet softness to brutal precision in a single line.
- Physical distance – bodies closing in or pulling away to signal shifting power.
- Eye contact – held just long enough to intimidate, then broken to punish.
- Humour – wicked asides that turn the audience into confidants and accomplices.
| Performer | Dominant Tactic | Effect on Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Lesley Manville | Ice‑cold wit | Uneasy admiration |
| Aidan Turner | Hazardous charm | Complicit fascination |
Reinventing a classic how this production reimagines Laclos for contemporary London audiences
Rather than dressing up de Laclos in period nostalgia, this staging slices straight into the moral anxieties of 2020s London.The gilt drawing rooms and powdered wigs are there, but they sit alongside a distinctly modern sensibility: clipped, almost boardroom-like exchanges, a visual palette that nods to luxury-brand minimalism, and a sound design that pulses with low, electronic unease. Desire here feels transactional, reputations are traded like financial instruments, and the audience is invited to recognize a world where private messages can be weaponised and intimacy is a high‑risk commodity. Director and designers frame the story less as a costume drama and more as a coolly forensic study of power – one that could unfold as easily in a Mayfair members’ club or a glass-walled law firm as in an 18th-century salon.
This contemporary charge is sharpened incidentally speaking the production reframes gender and consent, refusing to romanticise the libertine gamesmanship at its core. The script’s barbed wit is intact,but it now lands like a series of legal briefs,with characters acutely aware of optics,narrative control,and public shame. Visual motifs – phones standing in for billets-doux, mirrors used as surveillance rather than vanity – underscore how quickly seduction tips into coercion. The result is a world uncomfortably close to our own:
- Scandal spreads at viral speed, echoing social media pile-ons.
- Reputation is curated like a personal brand, then destroyed in an instant.
- Intimacy is negotiated in coded language and contractual subtext.
| Then | Now |
| Ink-sealed letters | Encrypted messages |
| Salon gossip | Group chats & leaks |
| Social exile | Public cancellation |
Intimate staging and period design creating a world of opulence cruelty and emotional risk
The production folds the audience into its decadent universe with an almost claustrophobic precision: gilt-framed mirrors, candlelit sconces, and richly upholstered furniture aren’t mere décor, but silent accomplices to the characters’ machinations. The close proximity between performers and spectators heightens the sense that every whispered aside and calculated caress is happening just an arm’s length away, turning private games into public spectacle. Subtle period details – the sheen of a silk waistcoat, the severe line of a corseted gown, the languid drape of a chaise longue – evoke a society steeped in privilege, yet the tight playing space strips away any illusion of safety. In this compressed arena, wealth becomes a trap, and the salon transforms into an emotional gladiatorial ring where status is both armour and weapon.
The design team leans into this tension between splendour and danger with a series of telling choices:
- Lighting that shifts from flattering candle-glow to unforgiving shadow as schemes sour.
- Costumes that signal characters’ shifting allegiances through color, texture, and dishevelled elegance.
- Sound that replaces grand orchestration with hushed rustles, distant carriages, and the crack of a fan snapping shut.
| Element | Effect on Audience |
| Compact salons | Intensifies voyeuristic unease |
| Luxe fabrics | Suggests seductive excess |
| Dim candlelight | Blurs morality and motives |
These carefully orchestrated choices do more than capture 18th-century France; they expose the rot beneath its polished veneer. Every cushion, candelabrum, and curtain becomes a risky hiding place for secrets, ensuring that the emotional stakes feel as volatile as the wax dripping from the chandeliers.
Who should see this Les Liaisons Dangereuses and why this revival is unmissable theatre
If you relish theatre that crackles with danger, wit, and moral rot, this is for you. Devotees of classic literature will appreciate how Christopher Hampton’s adaptation honours Laclos’s epistolary novel while sharpening it into a scalpel for the stage, and fans of Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner will find their star wattage harnessed to something darker and more intricate than mere celebrity casting. This revival also rewards audiences who enjoy productions that feel both period-specific and disturbingly current: the salons and satin are intact, but the power plays echo contemporary conversations about consent, reputation, and social performance.
- Lovers of psychological drama who want cruelty served with champagne fizz
- Star-focused theatregoers eager to see Manville and Turner in roles that test their range
- GCSE/A-level and university students studying the novel or themes of gender, power, and manipulation
- Design and direction enthusiasts who track how revivals update the canon
| Audience | What makes it unmissable |
|---|---|
| Theatre purists | Razor-sharp text, impeccably paced by the director |
| Drama students | A masterclass in subtext, stagecraft, and status games |
| Casual viewers | High-stakes plotting and sensual, cinematic staging |
| Fans of dark romance | A love story twisted into a weapon of war |
What makes this staging essential viewing is how it refuses to let the audience sit back and admire the decadence from a safe distance. Intimacy is treated as a battlefield, not a backdrop, and the leads turn each seduction into a strategic move, inviting us to question whom we’re rooting for and why. In a West End landscape crowded with comfortingly familiar revivals, this one feels genuinely volatile and alive, offering the rare sensation that a classic is not being dusted off, but actively detonated in front of us.
The Conclusion
this revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses earns its place in the current theatre landscape not by reinventing the wheel, but by sharpening it. Underpinning the evening are Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner,whose duelling performances bring dangerous clarity to Laclos’s vision of desire as a blood sport.Their Valmont and Merteuil remind us that the play’s intrigues are not period curiosities but recognizable power games, played in drawing rooms then and on screens now.
For audiences, the production offers both the polish of a classic and the immediacy of a contemporary psychological drama. If its opulent surfaces initially seduce, it is the moral wreckage left behind that lingers. This Les Liaisons Dangereuses may trade in elegance and wit,but it ultimately lands as a cool,clear-eyed study of manipulation – and a reminder that the most devastating battles are often fought behind closed doors.
