I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is as daring as Ms. Linney?

It’s glib to think that this fine actress who’s known for her unshowy emotional honesty is unsuitable for the role of Merteuil, the “virtuoso in deceit.” Ms. Linney’s scrubbed sanctimony in The Crucible is untypical of the more intriguing range of her work in the theater (Sight Unseen) and on film (Mystic River, You Can Count on Me). There’s no reason I can imagine why she can’t be emotionally honest playing a cow.

Cow is the polite c-word for the Marquise de Merteuil. The problem is that practically all emotion has been drained out of Ms. Linney’s performance.

She hasn’t been miscast, she’s been misdirected.

Rufus Norris’ revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses lurches from the ostentatiously starchy to the stylishly good to the heavy-handed and coarse. The British director’s overintellectualized idea of Merteuil has neutralized Ms. Linney’s emotional power to such an extent that she scarcely connects with the other actors onstage. There are long stretches when she doesn’t even look at anyone.

We’re meant to perceive her Merteuil as though she were a figure frozen in a painting.

ALL VERY WELL (and arty). Scott Pask’s elegant, unsurprising set with drapes and mirrors encourages such painterly narcissism. (The less refined emblem of the original 1986 staging was an unruly defiled bed.) But portraiture isn’t theater. It’s a director’s concept, and it’s out of sync with the rest of the production.

Given the courtly artifice and manners of the ancien régime in 18th-century France, doubtless Ms. Linney’s flawlessly mechanized stylization is historically correct. So, too, her studied, glacially slow walk or the unwaveringly precise manner in which she holds the fingers of her hands over her silk panier. But this is a Merteuil who has no fun with the games she plays.

In proto-feminist self-justification, she tells the Vicomte de Valmont—her sometime lover and unscrupulous partner in sexual conquest—“I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.” Merteuil is a woman who can say that her favorite word isn’t betrayal, but cruelty. She’s undeniably heartless.

And mercilessly so in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel. But Christopher Hampton’s renowned stage adaptation makes Merteuil more emotionally ambiguous, while his screen version for the Stephen Frears movie starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close had her crack up when Valmont betrays their libertine pact and falls in love with his biggest conquest—the pious, married Madame de Tourvel. The opportunity is there for Ms. Linney’s bloodless Merteuil to be human!

Ben Daniels’ Valmont, on the other hand, is having far too much fun. The British actor does a lot of Fragonard-ing about the joint, too. That perfect aristocratic posture—the stockinged, shapely leg slightly bent in front of the other, the insolently arched back to the manner born (and so on). Mr. Daniels’ cheerfully depraved Valmont—a man “who never opens his mouth without calculating the harm he can do”—is looser and warmer than his co-conspirator. His shade-too-likable performance lacks insinuating danger.

But the difference in acting styles between his confidently unrestrained Valmont and Ms. Linney’s archly suppressed Merteuil throws their unscrupulous partnership in de Sadean eroticism off balance. And with it, so goes the production.

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES is safe fare, as usual, for the Roundabout Theatre Company. You can’t go far wrong with a naughty period costume drama and a sword fight. (The lovely costumes are designed by Katrina Lindsay.) Frequently revived, there are at least six movie versions. But the famous play has always possessed intelligence and wit via Messrs. Hampton and Laclos, as well as the perverse erotic pull of the Valmont-Merteuil vortex.

Though set in the salons of the French aristocracy, the piece remains a little too upper-class British for the Roundabout Theatre to feel fully confident. Hence Mr. Norris, the British director imported to show us how to do it, and the casting of a British leading man, the award-winning Mr. Daniels, in his Broadway debut. The outcome is that no one is ever quite on the same embossed page.

Mr. Daniels’ accent, for example, is effortlessly, arrogantly upper-class; the American Ms. Linney is more reedily middle-class; and the accent of the great Welsh-born actress, Sian Phillips, playing the dowager Madame de Rosemonde, is, of course, exactly right (as is her perfect cameo).

The rest of the ensemble varies between American accents; or neutral (Jessica Collins giving a pleasing though somewhat vapid performance as the seduced and tragic Madame de Tourvel); or they’re what snooty Brits like to call common (Kristine Nielsen playing much too broadly as Madame de Volange).

Mamie Gummer’s 15-year-old convent girl, Cecile, is an American teen grown eagerly accustomed to getting laid. But Ms. Gummer is a smashing young actress whose performance is so alive and funny that her modern American-ness doesn’t matter in the least. She’s the embodiment of the play’s description of poor raped and wanton Cecile, “… no character and no morals, she’s altogether delicious.”

But there are other directorial lapses. Mr. Norris has straitjacketed Ms. Linney’s Merteuil, as I suggest. But, while making a meal out of courtly high style and outer decorum, he also makes Valmont look silly with a juvenile farting joke. The men strip naked gratuitously; the women don’t. To add “taste” to the proceedings, Handel is sung during the action (including the questionable choice of the haunting “Ombra mai fu” from Xerxes). But, alas, the Handel is sung badly.

For the umpteenth time, we have a set that collapses portentously for the final scene. (It’s a British thing. It must be a symbol.) Mr. Norris is obviously underlining the imminent overthrow of the ancien régime, while the carefully staged patterns formed by the dangling ropes in Merteuil’s now conveniently destroyed salon are clearly meant to evoke a spider’s web.

In the script, Christopher Hampton doesn’t mess about with such directorial froufrou. He notes that just before the lights fade on the final card-playing scene, there appears on the salon’s back wall, “fleeting, but sharp, a silhouette of a guillotine.”