McTeer can best be described as arch in her overly mannered approach to the character’s mechanizations. Valmont’s erstwhile paramour the Marquise de Merteuil (Janet McTeer, or Glenn Close in the movie) masterminds these seductions out of some perverse sense of fun and revenge. The Vicomte de Valmont (played by John Malkovich in the 1988 movie version of “Liaisons”) has taken it upon himself to seduce two virtuous women, Madame de Tourvel (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, or Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie) and the virginal Cecile Volanges (Elena Kampouris having just graduated from kindergarten, or Uma Thurman in the movie). Schreiber sounds as if Laurence Oliver’s tenor is fighting Richard Burton’s baritone, with all of this disharmony emitting from the esteemed American actor’s great granite face. In Liev Schreiber’s eccentric performance, this audio disconnect provides one of the few pleasures in what is otherwise a lethargic production, one that originated at London’s Donmar Warehouse under the direction of Josie Rourke. So why are the many American actors in the new Broadway revival, which opened Sunday at the Booth Theatre, talking with an English accent? Or if not English, a mid-Atlantic accent that’s pushed so far to the east that they’ll wash ashore in Cornwall any day now? In Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” the eighteenth-century aristocrats are supposed to be speaking French but for our benefit communicate with each other in English.

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