It also results in a numbing succession of erotic duets: Valmont and Madame de Merteuil Madame de Merteuil and the Comte de

It also results in a numbing succession of erotic duets: Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, Madame de Merteuil and the Comte de Gercourt, and so on and so on.The miracle, though, is that despite the tangle of intrigues and identities, Cooper still manages to tell the story clearly most of the time. Cooper has charisma to spare, Wildor, his wife, delicacy and charm. But this production has bigger ambitions than being a mere vehicle for the Posh and Becks of dance.How do you make a ballet out of Laclos’ novel? Do you go for the selective approach adopted in 1968 by Antony Tudor with Knight Errant? Or do you go for full-blown narrative fidelity? Cooper has opted for the second way – mistakenly, since this means a great many significant looks and flourished letters in aid of narrative exposition. The wonder is no one has yet thought up a range of marketing spin-offs – Liaisons Dangereuses chocolates, Liaisons Dangereuses valentine cards, Liaisons Dangereuses.. well, I leave the rest to other fevered imaginations. Meanwhile here comes the ballet, five years in the making, before finally finding Japanese sponsorship and receiving its world premiere last January in Tokyo.

She is a prize prey for Adam Cooper’s caddish, but ultimately vulnerable Valmont. Their final encounter is the climax of the ballet, a tormented realisation of mutual love, eliciting some of Cooper’s most abandoned choreography and wonderfully impassioned performances. In this simple but spectacular setting the aristocratic characters weave their web of liaisons and revenge. Obedient to strict etiquette in public, they form graceful Watteauesque social clusters; unbridled by their desires in private, they move with the brutal disorder of primitives.
Against this background, Sarah Wildor as Madame de Tourvel, makes a beautifully orchestrated entrance, her austere black dress an emblem of her virtuous soul. Vast voile curtains open; black-garbed, masked figures bearing torches pace ominously about a palatial room of mirrored ceiling and walls, apparently inspired by Versailles. Conceived and co-directed by the choreographer and dancer Adam Cooper and the designer Lez Brotherston, the production is an eyeful from the start.

We’ve had the play, we’ve had the films. Les Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel of 18th-century manners, has become a self-perpetuating industry. Jonson’s last-minute attempt to turn the villain’s death, at the hands of the mob, into a cause for grief is jolting. Sejanus isn’t as poetically soaring as Marlowe’s comparable over-reachers either.

Yet it’s an enthralling and superbly directed evening, played out against simple sandstone columns and ornate iron grilles (designed by Robert Jones).Barry Stanton’s Tiberius, with a bulbous, pustulating face, is horribly sleazy, seemingly weak and fey but secretly razor-sharp. As for Sejanus himself, William Houston (pictured left, with Miranda Colchester) is chilling and electrifyingly psychotic – like a jackal with the beady eyes of a snake Recommended.To 5 Nov, 0870 609 1110. In many ways, Sejanus is a fascinating prequel to Camus’ Caligula (recently aired at the Donmar), with that future emperor being glimpsed in this play as an innocent youth slipping into lascivious vice. You can also see the direct link – though in a very different mode – between this and Jonson’s savagely dark comedies as Sejanus’ seduced partner in crime, Livia, cakes make-up over her rotten complexion, and as a surviving clutch of honourable Romans fume at the palace flatterers who are “ready to praise/ His lordship if he spit or but piss fair,/ Have an indifferent stool, or break wind well.”There are loose ends, not least Livia dropping out of sight. From today’s perspective, many other parallels leap out too, especially with Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Tiberius’ tyrannised citizens are prepared to inform against their own families, show trials are orchestrated, and some sinister slaughterhouse has, we glean, been set up out of town.
Gregory Doran’s production, performed in rough hessian togas, does not strain to underline any modern relevance, nor does it need to because this proves (with some cuts) to be a gripping, essentially timeless drama about power-crazed political machinations and corruption. Nonetheless, he was summoned before the Privy Council on charges of sedition and popery regarding this work, perhaps precisely because it depicts a virtual police state and unjust accusations of treason. Nobody is quite sure how incendiary or just plain unpopular the original production was because Jonson’s published 1605 version was a redraft. This Roman tragedy by Ben Jonson – depicting the rise and fall of Emperor Tiberius’ ferociously ambitious favourite – has never before been attempted in Stratford, maybe because it was ripped to shreds when it premiered at the Globe in 1603. Still, the nasty taste this leaves in your mouth may have a lingering impact that effects some good in the long run.k.bassett independent.co.ukTo 28 August 020 7226 8561.