Hampton’s play is a dramatic adaptation of the sensationally successful novel with the same title, written in 1782 by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a French career soldier. The decadence of the prerevolutionary, aristocratic world in Laclos’s fiction proved an ideal match for Hampton’s thematic consistency in exploring individual and cultural corruption, abusive and self-destructive relationships, and the tensions between individual fulfillment and moral responsibility. In Laclos’s libertines Hampton recognized, and then re-created, eighteenth century counterparts to the malicious, sexually exploitative protagonists in some of his own work, including the poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse (pr. 1968, pb. 1969) and Dave in Treats (pr., pb. 1976). Indeed, Les Liaisons Dangereuses recalls both Total Eclipse and Treats in its focus on intimate relationships shaped by malice, verbal duels, and the deployment of sex as a weapon.

The marquise’s and Valmont’s power games in the original novel accorded marvelously with Hampton’s interest in intelligent, cold-blooded people who approach life as a competition that they must win by besting and even destroying others. This theme comes across in the game metaphor running throughout the play, as in the stage direction: “There flashes momentarily across Valmont’s face the expression of a chess champion who has just lost his queen,” or the marquise’s comment that once women yield sexually, men “hold every ace in the pack.” Understandably, Hampton also used military metaphors for his protagonists’ assaults on the mores of their society.

In Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as in other Hampton plays, language serves as one of the vehicles of corruption: His two schemers habitually rely on irony, puns, and perversely echoed expressions to exploit and deride others. For instance, Valmont refers to the marquise’s seduction of Danceny as “lessons,” callously calls Cécile’s miscarriage a “refurbishment,” and later breaks with Madame de Tourvel by brutally repeating the words whose emotionality originally displeased Mertueil: “It’s beyond my control.” In describing his exertions to get the play’s dialogue just right, Hampton said that he aimed at “a kind of language, artificial but tied to the period, elaborate but direct, the object of which was to mirror the novel’s difficult combination of scientific detachment and perilous emotional extremes.”

Although Hampton has insisted that as “a strategy for dealing with the horrors of the world . . . [the theater] should not pretend to console for things for which there is no consolation,” his shift of emphasis at the end of the play actually provides more hope than Laclos’s conception. By having the dying Valmont send a message of true love to Madame de Tourvel instead of vindictively giving Danceny the marquise’s letters for public exposure, Hampton virtually redeems Valmont and romantic love. In fact, there are no letters, since, unlike her epistolary predecessor, Hampton’s marquise makes it a principle never to write to her lovers. Something is salvaged in a cold world of calculation, viciousness, and debauchery.

By thus diluting both Madame de Tourvel and the marquise’s victimization by Valmont, Hampton loses some of his source’s attack on patriarchal abuse of women. True, in scene 4, he adapts the marquise’s famous account of how she invented herself to “dominate [Valmont’s] sex and avenge [her] own,” and in their last encounter, he has the marquise accuse Valmont of bullying women. But despite describing Laclos, in a note preceding the play, as a feminist, Hampton chooses to make their shared male villain in his last appearance less a representative of a misogynistic society than a man reformed by love.