DIRECTOR’S NOTE

Dangerous Liaisons by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, is one of the greatest works of world literature, if not the greatest, about manipulation, intrigue, and the devastating effect such behavior has on human lives.

The human soul is like a record, into which everything a person has thought, done, and felt is inscribed. The sins committed against others are difficult to erase from that record, and those committed against oneself are even harder. Every time we betray genuine love, every time we place egoism above emotion and empathy, an irreversible part of us is diminished.

Atonement for such spiritual crimes is possible only through profound spiritual effort, but the characters in this play are not spiritual beings. They belong to a privileged social class that spends its immense wealth and leisure on entertainment and endless emotional and sexual games with one another. That is why their collective fate, as a social class, is historically sealed, although the play does not deal with it directly. After the events of this drama come to an end, the French Revolution will erupt and bring the arrogant privileges of these people to a bloody conclusion.

What Dangerous Liaisons teaches us—a deeply moral story—resonates across all eras: manipulating emotions is an unforgivable sin, a crime that cannot be redeemed, and a form of hubris that inevitably leads to ruin.

Before us on stage parade powerful, elegantly dressed, wealthy, and profoundly unhappy people, whose existential driving force is vanity. On January 31, the Niš audience will witness how these characters learn difficult lessons about the deep deviancy of lives filled with lies and intrigue.

Which of them ultimately experience catharsis, even through the inevitability of death that brings repentance, and which remain trapped in the limbo of their narcissism, like in a hellish chamber of opposing mirrors where nothing exists but countless reflections of their own unhappiness and loneliness—that is the subject of the production that will be presented to the Niš audience.