The Blue Room
- By: David Hare, adapted
from La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler
Director: Loveday Ingram
With: Camilla Power, Michael Higgs
Duration: 90 minutes |
|
Haymarket Theatre Royal
Haymarket
London SW1
Tube: Piccadilly Circus
(Run Finished) |
Performances:
Eves Mon-Sat 8pm
Mats Wed 3pm, Sat 5pm
UKP17.50-27.50
|
In Short:
Chillingly intimate,
and funky, take on La Ronde's sexual daisy-chain.
In Full:
Even those who've never
heard of Sam Mendes, David Hare, or Arthur Schnitzler will remember
the result of these thespians labour - The Blue Room. Commissioned
by the Donmar two years ago, this raunchy little number was up
on its feet with remarkable speed, the kind of runaway success
that doesn't insist upon its ability to turn audiences inside
out but calmly does the business.
Ingrims funky new production
makes it hard to believe either that author Schnitzler wrote
his commentary on male-female relationships in 1900 or that he
deemed it completely unprintable. Assisted by u.v. lighting,
club music and a slide projector blasting out the time our changing
protagonists take to come to orgasm, Ingrim and translator Hare
successfully modernise Schnitzlers text.
Yet to their credit they preserve
the essence of the work he originally called La Ronde - a title
that hints at the sexual daisy chain so carefully structuring
a collection of self-contained but interlocking scenes. Beginning
with the girl and the taxi driver, ending with the girl and the
aristocrat, and introducing us to the au pair, the student, the
politician, the model, and the playwright along the way, each
scene reveals one of the characters from the scene before engaging
in liasons with a new partner until the play comes full circle
and reintroduces us to two familiar characters.
Making two actors play all
ten parts complicates as much as it simplifies, but ultimately
engages. Not least because of Camilla Power and Michael Higgs
faultless performances, we feel by the end that we know all these
characters, and ourselves, in uncomfortable detail. As with all
good theatre the experience is chillingly intimate.
Helena Thompson
Other Critics
Anti
'Take away the hype and you've got the theatrica equivalent of
Brewer's Droop.' Time Out
Theatre
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