Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Gate Theatre, Dublin

A revealing moment comes midway through the Gate’s wickedly handsome revival of Christopher Hampton’s 1985 play, based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel. The Vicomte de Valmont, both libertine and serpentine, lures an ingénue into his confidence, using her shawl as a distraction. Nick Dunning playfully trails the gossamer material through the air, like bait. What strikes you most, though, is the look on his face. Not one of cunning or pleasure, but one of fathomless boredom. It’s all too easy.

Michael Barker-Caven's production certainly captures the elegance and decadence of Versailles-era France with a knowing eye, serving the deliciously dark wit of a script so sharp it could lacerate Simon Higlett's economical but effective scenery. But this game of seduction – and it is always a game – is here marked with a fascinating dispassion. Dunning, who recently played the Devil in The Seafarer, is so surly and diabolical that his Valmont actually seems like a promotion. His costume, iridescent with rhinestones, wouldn't look out of place on an ancien régimeElvis, but staring at Catherine Walker's virtuous Madame de Tourvel with eyes as cold as a shark, there is little charming about this charmer. Rather, he is a master of words and intricate plotting; reasons why both he and this play are devastatingly seductive.

“Love and revenge,” proposes Fiona Bell’s co-conspirator, the Marquise de Merteuil, “two of your favourites.” But love has no place in these machinations of the idle classes. Bell’s performance, arch and acidic, repudiates emotion as a weakness: “Love is something you use, not something to fall into, like quicksand.”

Something similar happens to the audience, entranced by the sheer cleverness of the charcacters’ villainy, dazzled by the verve of Hampton’s dialogue, sucked into immoral complicity against our better judgment. It’s one of those plays your mother warned you about.

There are moments that break the spell with a cold shudder. Jane McGrath’s Cécile is so young and vulnerable that her deflowering is deeply unsettling.

Conversely, amid dialogue that anatomises the politics of sexuality (and the occasional double entendre that now seems as sophisticated as Benny Hill), Dunning’s own undoing – being ambushed by genuine feeling – and Walker’s tortured submission don’t register with a requisite seriousness of tone.

It’s as though the vigour of game has reduced everyone to playing pieces.

Without over-stating any parallels, Barker-Caven lets the depiction of an indulged and corrupted society, rotting from within and on the verge of violent collapse, resonate with a soft echo. “I look forward to what the new decade will bring,” says Bell’s virtuoso of deceit, and finally she is not in control of the irony. A revolution awaits her, but it is already endgame. Until April 24