A Roundelay of Deadly Conquests LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES by Christopher Hampton

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Love is not an easy game to play, particularly when the jousters cannot decide whether they seek passion or dispassion, rapturous attachment or jaded detachment. In the megalomaniacal gambitry of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a glittering epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos set on the eve of revolution in 18th century France, the only thing more dangerous than a seducer's assailing a person of virtue is the seducer's somehow falling in love: the conflict between the rakehell's manipulative pride and his newly vulnerable passion ignites everything in its path, leaving him and his partners burned-out husks, dead or wishing they were. A novel of letters is not easily transmuted into a cinematic montage of stage action. Yet Les Liaisons has been adapted into an equally brilliant and witty tragedy of manners by Christopher Hampton (The Philanthropist, Total Eclipse) for Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. The R.S.C. staging, which won the 1986 Olivier award for best play, the West End's equivalent of the Tony, has been imported intact. Last week it set Broadway ablaze.

From the first glimpse the show speaks in portents. The chief piece of furniture is a preposterously tall highboy, its drawers spilling out cloth and papers and ropes of pearls just as the characters are about to spill out secrets, its surface appearing as unvarnished as the truths to come. Every character with a sexual life is dressed in some variation of off-white -- and looks cool, stylish and slightly soiled. Two ornate sofas are shrouded with crumpled, much used sheets: this is a world of ceaseless, unsatisfying copulation. Although the sides of the stage are heaped with the bric-a-brac of elegance -- candelabra, statuary, flowers -- the characters seem more at home with simple louvered screens, behind which they peep and eavesdrop. The dialogue is fittingly brittle and epigrammatic. "When it comes to marriage," a much traveled woman says, "one man is as good as the next; and even the least accommodating is less trouble than a mother."

The central figures in this roundelay are a bewitchingly malign marquise (Lindsay Duncan), a good woman tempted to self-betrayal by love (Suzanne Burden), a virgin eager to surrender to ecstasy (Beatie Edney) and the highborn roue who is their sequential wooer (Alan Rickman). The essence of the roue's sexual appeal is a chilly, offhand disinterest. Neither kind nor attentive nor particularly virile, he does not so much inspire devotion as command it; he does not so much arouse ardor as compel his victims to confront their suppressed sexuality. He believes all virtue is fraud, and he delights in destroying women by making them believe so too. He has only one love, the marquise, and she is less a companion than a rival. Rickman and Duncan are at once captivating and appalling. Theirs is a black-widow-spider courting ritual of conquests and abrupt abandonments.

But these creatures are not immune to their own venom. Howard Davies' direction, unobtrusive until the marquise declares war on her erstwhile sparring partner, fills the play's final minutes with haze and glare and an eerie, slow-motion duel. The end brings wholly unanticipated griefs to the apparent survivors. Yet there is no comforting afterglow of justice or even vengeance -- only the acrid residue of wanton agony.