Dangerous Liaisons

DANGEROUS LIAISONS A new stage adaptation of the famous epistolary novel. One of the cornerstones of world literature, Dangerous Liaisons has been provoking readers and stirring scandal ever since it first appeared in 1782, when it became an instant bestseller. Valmont has stood ever since as the archetypal seducer, and as one of the best-known characters in all of fiction. It is no accident that the novel’s extraordinary popularity is said to have fed the shift in thinking that led to the French Revolution. The story of those two cynics of the heart, Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, has been retold many times on stage, on radio and on screen. Their wager – that Valmont will seduce the unattainable Madame de Tourvel – looks at first like a frivolous game with feelings, as does the “initiation” of the innocent Cécile. But beneath the brilliant talk, the sparkling exchanges and the powdered rococo plumage rages a cynical struggle for power, whipped on by a wounded woman’s hunger for revenge. And can such a wager ever be won? What are we playing with when we counterfeit a love for the ages? How will the worldly Valmont hold up against real feeling – above all his own? A play about the fear of love, about pain and about growing up, it presses on our own moment as provocatively as ever.

In one of his finest productions in some time, Čermák has staked more on the body and on the aesthetics of beauty than on the power of the word. He carries the whole story lightly into a modern idiom – modern costumes and set, music that reaches even for Korean pop, a sharp lighting design, and a string of updates woven into the action itself. Today’s language speaks through the way the characters behave; relationships fall apart just as they do in the source; love becomes a word draining of meaning. The production rides on a set of superb performances, led by K. Baranová, and the Liberec actors find just the right charge of chemistry between them.
IVA BRYNDOVÁ, i-divadlo.cz

In Čermák’s dramatisation, the staging of Laclos’s rococo salon novel is perfectly balanced and impeccably composed in the way it folds period elements together with updated ones set in the present. With a single directorial gesture, Čermák seems to strip from this world of amorous intrigue and cruelty the top layer of refined courtly talk, of rococo crinolines and wigs, and lay bare the inner lives of the characters and their relationships.
ZUZANA AUGUSTOVÁ, Podhoubí

The production (…) slyly draws a striking set of parallels between the plot of a classic epistolary novel and the sterile, dehumanised decadence of social media today. (…)

Čermák’s uncompromising vision, powerfully served by the style-defining set of his regular collaborators Pavlína Chroňáková and Martina Zwyrtek, shows a universe utterly torn apart by generational conflict, a world stripped of any working family ties (…). The space is ruled, ecstatically, by those voracious devourers of souls and bodies, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, played with enormous flair by Karolína Baranová and Filip Jáša. Both make a persuasive show of the gulf between a loudly paraded outward perfection and a whole spectrum of inner frustration – a gulf that becomes the production’s symptomatic stage metaphor, pushed to its tragic conclusion, for today’s Instagram generation. For it consumes not only the authors of its ills but, in the end, even breeds fresh and eager imitators in the Chevalier Danceny (Matěj Neubauer) and Cécile de Volanges (Eva Goldmannová). A gripping, singularly entertaining, mercilessly clinical vivisection that matches even Müller’s Quartett for sheer force. One of the productions of the year. Not to be missed!
PETR KLARIN KLÁR, Divadelní.net

JAKUB ČERMÁK (1981) An experienced playwright and a director impossible to overlook, with an idiosyncratic view of the world and a rare gift for stage imagery. For twenty years he led the thriving Prague arts collective Depressive Children Longing for Money, which turned the Venuše ve Švehlovce cellar in Žižkov into a fashionable independent theatre – the place to be seen if you wanted to be in the know. Since January 2025 he has been head of drama at the South Bohemian Theatre in České Budějovice. His work runs in two directions: updated reworkings of classic plays (Maryša Is Silent, Antigone, Hamlet, The Trojan Women) and of literary works (The Sorrows of Young Werther, The 120 Days of Sodom) on the one hand, and contemporary experimental forms such as immersive and documentary theatre on the other. His immersive project Happy End at the Hotel Chateau Switzerland (2022) won the Divadelní noviny Award, and his play Everyone Deserves Their Purgatory took third place at the international Dráma competition in Bratislava (2022). The …příští vlna / next wave… festival named him Personality of the Year 2020; he won the Czech Theatre DNA Award for an outstanding contribution to alternative theatre at the Malá inventura festival in 2020; and has been nominated for the Divadelní noviny Award several times (2018, 2019, 2021).

THE DRAMA COMPANY OF THE F. X. ŠALDA THEATRE IN LIBEREC Since 2021 the DFXŠ drama company has been led by the director Kateřina Dušková, who, with the dramaturgs Lenka Chválová and Jiří Janků, builds on the work of Šimon Dominik and Ivan Rajmont and is succeeding in two directions not easily reconciled. A local-minded dramaturgy and finely crafted entertainment have put down firm roots in the cultural life of the city and won the lasting loyalty of its audiences. At the same time, the management brings in the most demanding directors and seeks out dramaturgical challenges that push the ensemble beyond its tried-and-tested methods. At the heart of both impulses, though, lies the art of acting – and an actor-led dramaturgy as a first principle. The results show in the company’s growing strength, and in a run of exceptional honours: the Thálie Award twice in succession, for instance – in 2022 for Veronika Korytářová in the title role of Tomáš Dianiška’s devised piece Burian, and in 2023 for Karolína Baranová in the title role of Janka Ryšánek Schmiedtová’s Marie Antoinette. The company appears at international festivals (this year Theatre World Brno and, for the fourth time, the Divadlo International Theatre Festival in Pilsen) and regularly takes prizes at the Grand Festival of Laughter in Pardubice. Dangerous Liaisons was voted Best Production of the 2024/2025 season in the poll of the expert panel at i-divadlo.cz.