The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that "a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity." Necessity in the case of Choderlos de Laclos was having witnessed first hand the decadence and amorality of 18th-century French upper-crust society. He wrote it all down in his scandalous novel published in 1782, possibly one of the first quiet pistol shots in the revolution that would follow seven years later.
Two hundred years later the playwright Christopher Hampton took Laclos's novel and turned it into a play. It was 1985: Britain was booming, the champagne was flowing, the miners had been defeated and humiliated and the only revolution in the offing was the transformation of Britain into a privatised Thatcherite theme park. But Hampton was canny enough to see the parallels between Laclos era and his own time, the die or win mentality, the lack of compassion. His play was a small bomb set off in the heart of the theatrical establishment - the RSC.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an easy play to misjudge. I was one to do so at the time, mistaking its gloss for superficiality and its complex portrait of the treacherous La Marquise de Merteuil as a tacit approval of her. Hampton is actually detached, scientific, probing like a lab technician with a dish full of worms. If the audience finds amorality and intrigue attractive, it says something about them, not Hampton's play. Of course numerous regional revivals and at least three Hollywood versions of the play have got it all wrong, playing it as if it were some kind of rich chocolate pudding - wickedly decadent and moreish. But here Samuel West's production, first of the new regime at Bristol, matches Hampton's detachment. From the very first scene with a clock ticking down towards revolution and Madame de Volanges effectively pimping her own teenage daughter, you know that this is a rotten society.
The way the lines are delivered, particularly by Dervla Kirwin's Marquise, is completely contemporary, adding to the sense that this is not costume drama but a modern analysis of modern society. This could be a really superb production but for two things: Rupert Penry-Jones's Valmont is too much of a nice boy, not the charismatic rotter he has to be if the audience's morality is to be tested, and there is no electrifying spark between him and the Marquise, no sense of a terrible game being played to the death. But things are very much looking up at Bristol.
· Until April 5. Box office: 0117- 987 7877.
