Listless, not dangerous

Anyone who in 1985 saw Christopher Hampton's thrilling adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary novel of sex and power relations ought to avoid the Playhouse.

For some of the acting in Tim Fywell's dismal revival is dangerously bad. Emilia Fox and Dilys Laye have just the right style. But it only takes the miscasting of two key roles to destroy the stealthy, erotic spell - and Fywell has spectacularly miscast.

La Marquise de Merteuil and Le Vicomte de Valmont collude in sado-masochistic games of seduction and are, in suitable return, ruined by their stratagems. Sadly, Jared Harris, stepping, or rather stumbling, in the footsteps of Alan Rickman and John Malkovich - who respectively played Valmont on stage and film - together with Polly Walker as La Marquise, are all at sea.

Hampton's adaptation is rendered in educated, contemporary speech and 18th century syntax. Robert Innes-Hopkins's imposing design, with its gold furniture, chandeliers and pale apricot walls and John Lunn's baroque-sounding music are finely tuned to the playwright's style.

But Hampton's intricate, sentences require actors to vary their pitch, tone and emphases. The subtext, with its suppressed sexual ardour, needs to be conveyed as well. But Harris's flat, near-monotone delivery is more redolent of a speaking clock than an aristocratic homme fatale.

He delivers his elegant speeches of seduction as if he were a coalman heaving sacks of coal. When despair and self-disgust are called for he taps a vein of hollowness. His ugly diction - "seckerterial" for "secretarial", akshirley" for "actually" - is estuary, not aristocratic.

When he woos Olivia Llewellyn's convincing, pathetic virgin, all the way to bed and worse, or Emilia Fox's always intelligently spoken and emotionally truthful La Presidente, he resembles a simple serving man with ideas above his station rather than a devious viscount.

Polly Walker's handsome Marquise, who hatches the plot for Valmont to seduce the two young women and lives to regret it, plays far too common, modern and trivial. Her perky manner reminds me of the manageress of a Godalming country pub, dolled up for a Christmas fancy-dress ball.

The doomed, erotic and ironic scenario collapses in Fywell's misbegotten production. Only the climactic rapier duel musters conviction.

Booking to 27 March. Information: 020 7369 1785.

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