A Minuet Between Sexual Predators
Richard Termine for The New York Times
From left, Rachel Eberhart, Benoît Maréchal, Ariel Garcia Valdès and Isabelle Huppert in “Quartett,” Heiner Müller's stage version of Choderlos de Laclos's novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy BEN BRANTLEY
Published: November 6, 2009
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‘Quartett’
Trailer: 'Quartett' (BAM.org)
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Times Topics: Isabelle Huppert | Robert Wilson (Director) | Brooklyn Academy of Music
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Richard Termine for The New York Times
"Quartett": Robert Wilson adapts Heiner Müller’s play at the Harvey Theater. More Photos »
Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.
Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.
Theatergoers who use plays as mood-setting preludes to romantic evenings had better look elsewhere. “Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.
This should not come as a surprise to those familiar with either the novel that inspired “Quartett” or with the work of the man who staged this production. Published on the eve of the French Revolution, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is the most unsentimental of novels on the art of love, a treatise on sexual seduction as a military exercise. And Mr. Wilson, the aesthete par excellence of avant-garde theater, is a celebrated creator of images that find the elegance in existential agony.
Wilson devotees will encounter many of his signatures here: the fuguelike repetition of sound and movement; the sight of figures crossing a stage with the millimeter-by-millimeter momentum of a speeding glacier; and the symmetrical, body-twisting poses that suggest that, should Irving Penn be reincarnated on the spot, he wouldn’t have to change a thing to capture a perfectly rarefied fashion image.
But I have never before seen these decorative elements deployed with such deliberate contempt by Mr. Wilson, who first staged “Quartett” two decades ago. In portraying the civilized savagery of the Marquise de Merteuil (Ms. Huppert) and Vicomte de Valmont (Ariel Garcia Valdès), her partner in erotic crime, Mr. Wilson turns the sort of exquisite forms with which he made his reputation into the visual equivalent of a perfume that masks the stench of putrefying flesh.
Even those familiar with the story of “Liaisons,” from its various stage and film adaptations (including movie versions by Stephen Frears and Milos Forman from the late 1980s) may not always be able to follow the dances of seduction and destruction that Mr. Wilson has choreographed. Mr. Müller, a German playwright of apocalyptic vision and form-fracturing technique, specified that his version of Laclos’s world, written in the early 1980s, is set in both “a drawing room before the French Revolution” and “an air raid shelter after World War III.”
This befits a work that seems to take place in the shadow of a crypt. As written, the play has only two characters, Merteuil and Valmont, who remember romantic war games of yore in anatomically unstinting detail. In recollecting past conquests — notably those of the virtuous Madame de Tourvel and the virginal Cécile de Volanges by Valmont — they act out the seductions, with Merteuil often playing Valmont. The language — French in this case, with English supertitles — is often poetic, ritualistic, even ecclesiastical, but with an abiding awareness that whatever pleasures the flesh may afford, it is destined to rot. The decadence practiced by these aristocrats is rooted in the consciousness of decay.
Mr. Wilson introduces three other performers into his lovers’ orbit — Louis Beyler, Rachel Eberhart and Benoît Maréchal — who seem to be vestigial figures of youth past and old age to come. In truth, they feel rather superfluous, like sprays of leaves to make a bouquet of choice flowers look fuller, though Mr. Wilson uses them to arresting effect in tableaus (involving items like nooses and chic chairs that might have come from a Milan showroom).
It’s in the duets between Valmont and Merteuil that the production achieves its hypnotic hold, as they mock and taunt and soliloquize angrily in artificially distorted voices that range from academic detachment to bestial howls. Only occasionally do they make physical contact. For all their history of pressing the flesh of others, these are the loneliest people you’ve ever seen.
Mr. Wilson underscores the point by dividing his characters with scrims and pools of light that seem to confine them to inescapably separate orbits. They are given to holding the palms of their hands before their faces, as if they were looking into a mirror, gestures that suggest both their terminal narcissism and the idea of their bodies as prisons. Lines are repeated like litanies. They have played these games many times before, and are hungry for some small, enlivening variation on their old routines.
Michael Galasso’s music matches both the chilly repetitiveness of the incantatory dialogue (with nods to French court music) and the eruptions of animal impulses (with disco-style music that makes these aristos look, well, cheap). Mr. Valdes’s Valmont, who has the look of a Kabuki actor playing Mephistopheles, tends to travel in a special red spotlight and would seem to be a fixed symbolic entity. Yet as he portrays the different characters in his and Merteuil’s memory plays, Valmont melts into those roles before he can stop himself. Even for these supreme egoists, individual identity is a dubious proposition.
But it is the Merteuil of Ms. Huppert that rises to a level of complete, perfectly sustained art. Those who know this French actress only from her intense, naturalistic film work for directors like Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard may be shocked by the uncompromising artificiality of her performance here. Wearing a sculptured coiffure with a high, asymmetrical horn and a one-armed second-skin sheath of a dress, she’s the ultimate ossified socialite, embalmed in her infinite self-regard and hoping that her disdain for death will save her from it.
Merteuil talks fast and moves slowly, propelled by a sense that all vice is acceptable if one adheres to a certain formal style. Much of this production succeeds in abstract terms, but Ms. Huppert’s Merteuil, as baroquely stylized as she is, suggests a real, specific person: the sum of every reedlike French fashion plate who ever appeared in the society pages of Vogue. Her appearance in the beautiful, devastating final image suggests that even the most exquisite world weariness is no defense against an emptiness far deeper than fashionable ennui.
QUARTETT
By Heiner Müller, based on Choderlos de Laclos’s “Liaisons Dangereuses”; conceived and directed by Robert Wilson; music by Michael Galasso; sets by Mr. Wilson; lighting by Mr. Wilson and A J Weissbard; translated by Jean Jourdheuil and Béatrice Perregaux; costumes by Frida Parmeggiani; co-directed by Ann-Christin Rommen; makeup design by Luc Verschueren; scenic design by Stephanie Engeln. An Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production, presented by the 2009 Next Wave Festival, Alan H. Fishman, chairman of the board; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer; co-produced by La Comédie de Genève and Théâtre du Gymnase/Marseille. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100. In French, with English subtitles. Through Nov. 14. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Isabelle Huppert (Merteuil), Ariel Garcia Valdès (Valmont), Louis Beyler, Rachel Eberhart and Benoît Maréchal.
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Richard Termine for The New York Times
From left, Rachel Eberhart, Benoît Maréchal, Ariel Garcia Valdès and Isabelle Huppert in “Quartett,” Heiner Müller's stage version of Choderlos de Laclos's novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
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Share
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy BEN BRANTLEY
Published: November 6, 2009
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
‘Quartett’
Trailer: 'Quartett' (BAM.org)
Related
Times Topics: Isabelle Huppert | Robert Wilson (Director) | Brooklyn Academy of Music
Enlarge This Image
Richard Termine for The New York Times
"Quartett": Robert Wilson adapts Heiner Müller’s play at the Harvey Theater. More Photos »
Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.
Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.
Theatergoers who use plays as mood-setting preludes to romantic evenings had better look elsewhere. “Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.
This should not come as a surprise to those familiar with either the novel that inspired “Quartett” or with the work of the man who staged this production. Published on the eve of the French Revolution, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is the most unsentimental of novels on the art of love, a treatise on sexual seduction as a military exercise. And Mr. Wilson, the aesthete par excellence of avant-garde theater, is a celebrated creator of images that find the elegance in existential agony.
Wilson devotees will encounter many of his signatures here: the fuguelike repetition of sound and movement; the sight of figures crossing a stage with the millimeter-by-millimeter momentum of a speeding glacier; and the symmetrical, body-twisting poses that suggest that, should Irving Penn be reincarnated on the spot, he wouldn’t have to change a thing to capture a perfectly rarefied fashion image.
But I have never before seen these decorative elements deployed with such deliberate contempt by Mr. Wilson, who first staged “Quartett” two decades ago. In portraying the civilized savagery of the Marquise de Merteuil (Ms. Huppert) and Vicomte de Valmont (Ariel Garcia Valdès), her partner in erotic crime, Mr. Wilson turns the sort of exquisite forms with which he made his reputation into the visual equivalent of a perfume that masks the stench of putrefying flesh.
Even those familiar with the story of “Liaisons,” from its various stage and film adaptations (including movie versions by Stephen Frears and Milos Forman from the late 1980s) may not always be able to follow the dances of seduction and destruction that Mr. Wilson has choreographed. Mr. Müller, a German playwright of apocalyptic vision and form-fracturing technique, specified that his version of Laclos’s world, written in the early 1980s, is set in both “a drawing room before the French Revolution” and “an air raid shelter after World War III.”
This befits a work that seems to take place in the shadow of a crypt. As written, the play has only two characters, Merteuil and Valmont, who remember romantic war games of yore in anatomically unstinting detail. In recollecting past conquests — notably those of the virtuous Madame de Tourvel and the virginal Cécile de Volanges by Valmont — they act out the seductions, with Merteuil often playing Valmont. The language — French in this case, with English supertitles — is often poetic, ritualistic, even ecclesiastical, but with an abiding awareness that whatever pleasures the flesh may afford, it is destined to rot. The decadence practiced by these aristocrats is rooted in the consciousness of decay.
Mr. Wilson introduces three other performers into his lovers’ orbit — Louis Beyler, Rachel Eberhart and Benoît Maréchal — who seem to be vestigial figures of youth past and old age to come. In truth, they feel rather superfluous, like sprays of leaves to make a bouquet of choice flowers look fuller, though Mr. Wilson uses them to arresting effect in tableaus (involving items like nooses and chic chairs that might have come from a Milan showroom).
It’s in the duets between Valmont and Merteuil that the production achieves its hypnotic hold, as they mock and taunt and soliloquize angrily in artificially distorted voices that range from academic detachment to bestial howls. Only occasionally do they make physical contact. For all their history of pressing the flesh of others, these are the loneliest people you’ve ever seen.
Mr. Wilson underscores the point by dividing his characters with scrims and pools of light that seem to confine them to inescapably separate orbits. They are given to holding the palms of their hands before their faces, as if they were looking into a mirror, gestures that suggest both their terminal narcissism and the idea of their bodies as prisons. Lines are repeated like litanies. They have played these games many times before, and are hungry for some small, enlivening variation on their old routines.
Michael Galasso’s music matches both the chilly repetitiveness of the incantatory dialogue (with nods to French court music) and the eruptions of animal impulses (with disco-style music that makes these aristos look, well, cheap). Mr. Valdes’s Valmont, who has the look of a Kabuki actor playing Mephistopheles, tends to travel in a special red spotlight and would seem to be a fixed symbolic entity. Yet as he portrays the different characters in his and Merteuil’s memory plays, Valmont melts into those roles before he can stop himself. Even for these supreme egoists, individual identity is a dubious proposition.
But it is the Merteuil of Ms. Huppert that rises to a level of complete, perfectly sustained art. Those who know this French actress only from her intense, naturalistic film work for directors like Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard may be shocked by the uncompromising artificiality of her performance here. Wearing a sculptured coiffure with a high, asymmetrical horn and a one-armed second-skin sheath of a dress, she’s the ultimate ossified socialite, embalmed in her infinite self-regard and hoping that her disdain for death will save her from it.
Merteuil talks fast and moves slowly, propelled by a sense that all vice is acceptable if one adheres to a certain formal style. Much of this production succeeds in abstract terms, but Ms. Huppert’s Merteuil, as baroquely stylized as she is, suggests a real, specific person: the sum of every reedlike French fashion plate who ever appeared in the society pages of Vogue. Her appearance in the beautiful, devastating final image suggests that even the most exquisite world weariness is no defense against an emptiness far deeper than fashionable ennui.
QUARTETT
By Heiner Müller, based on Choderlos de Laclos’s “Liaisons Dangereuses”; conceived and directed by Robert Wilson; music by Michael Galasso; sets by Mr. Wilson; lighting by Mr. Wilson and A J Weissbard; translated by Jean Jourdheuil and Béatrice Perregaux; costumes by Frida Parmeggiani; co-directed by Ann-Christin Rommen; makeup design by Luc Verschueren; scenic design by Stephanie Engeln. An Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production, presented by the 2009 Next Wave Festival, Alan H. Fishman, chairman of the board; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer; co-produced by La Comédie de Genève and Théâtre du Gymnase/Marseille. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100. In French, with English subtitles. Through Nov. 14. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Isabelle Huppert (Merteuil), Ariel Garcia Valdès (Valmont), Louis Beyler, Rachel Eberhart and Benoît Maréchal.
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