{"id":12918,"date":"2016-11-16T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T17:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=12918"},"modified":"2016-11-18T09:18:15","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T17:18:15","slug":"les-liaisons-dangereuses-draws-upper-class-parallels-from-eras-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/11\/16\/les-liaisons-dangereuses-draws-upper-class-parallels-from-eras-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Les Liaisons Dangereuses<\/em> draws upper-class parallels from eras past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sex is a weapon of manipulation. At least the two rivals in the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses <\/i>would have you believe it is. But the play\u2014Christopher Hampton\u2019s stage adaptation of the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel\u2014is much more than that, says director Fran Gebhard.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe play is set in the 1780s, just before the French revolution,\u201d says Gebhard. \u201cHampton wrote it in the 1980s, just before the turn of the century, and, for him, there were correlations there. For us, being far past that, those correlations are different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Costume designer Graham McMonagle has incorporated both elegance and style into the costumes, with complicated layers, subtle colour changes, and glittery hand-painted designs. McMonagle succeeds in bringing out what Gebhard calls a performative aspect, which was very pronounced in the upper classes\u2014where reputation was everything\u2014of the time.<\/p>\n

\"les-liaisons-daneruses-credit-david-lowes\"<\/a>
There\u2019s more than a little bit of today in <em>Les Liaisons Dangereuses<\/em>, which is set in the 1780s (photo by David Lowes).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMy idea is that the performative aspect, the soul, the interior of the person, there are layers on top of that, which we represent by the clothing,\u201d says Gebhard.<\/p>\n

Gebhard says that the two aforementioned rivals in the play are evil, manipulative, upper-class villains. But they\u2019re villains she hopes the audience will love.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re verbally dexterous with one another,\u201d says Gebhard. \u201cYou can feel that there\u2019s a great love between these two people and if they could put their egos aside, they should end up as a couple. But they can\u2019t. They must keep jousting\u2014or perhaps fencing is a better analogy, because there is fencing in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idea of layering is further represented, more subtly, in the set design. Gebhard describes the furniture as being somewhat realistic, but the shades make it seem like a \u201ckind of cocoon world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have beautiful ecru silk as a backdrop,\u201d says Gebhard, \u201cdrapery to mirror the idea of layering. You don\u2019t see it too much, but you can see there\u2019s a big swoop, and there\u2019s some layers of curtain, and there\u2019s another curtain that\u2019s further downstage.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she was choosing this play, Gebhard was unaware that it was being played in Broadway and London; she says that this shows that she isn\u2019t the only one who sees the timeliness of the revival and the relevance in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel that the audience will be able to relate the stars of this upper class to some of the people who have their 15 minutes of fame today,\u201d says Gebhard, \u201cNot that they\u2019re necessarily evil; I\u2019m not saying that. I\u2019m saying that they are manipulative in creating a performative aspect of their life. That then becomes so interesting that their life is their theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
\n<\/i>Until Saturday, November 26
\n(pre-show lecture at 7 pm on Friday, November 18)
\n$15 for students,
\nUVic\u2019s Phoenix Theatre
\nfinearts.uvic.ca\/theatre<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sex is a weapon of manipulation. At least the two rivals in the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses would have you believe it is. But the play\u2014Christopher Hampton\u2019s stage adaptation of the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel\u2014is much more than that, says director Fran Gebhard. \u201cThe play is set in the 1780s, just before the French […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-issue","category-november-16-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12918"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12930,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12918\/revisions\/12930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}