Here we go again: Another go-round at the La Ronde cycle. (Also see my recent Delaware regional review of Hello Again.) This is David Hare's contemporary adaptation of the old play by Arthur Schnitzler that was set in 19th century Vienna. Five men and five women of different social position, class and education have sexual encounters that form a daisy chain. In each scene, two characters meet, seduce or are seduced by each other, and leave with a sense of disappointment. Hare's version, much like the original, has a sardonic and melancholy edge, making the point that sex without genuine affection is ultimately empty.
Henry Gleitman has staged it with a series of windows between the audience and much of the action, calling attention to the idea that many of us today have become voyeurs, incessantly peering out of our windows and into the windows of others. All the parts in The Blue Room are played by two actors, but they are given a variety of accents—mostly British—to denote their different social positions.
The Blue Room has become a tour de force for actors. You may recall that Nicole Kidman attracted attention when she played in it. Here two local thesp do excellent work. Elizabeth Webster is especially adorable as a teen-aged cockney and is fine in all her other guises as well. Benjamin White is equally compelling throughout, and his most memorable characterization is a Beatle-ish playwright-musician. There's full frontal nudity for extended scenes - much more than in the New York production with Kidman - and the two performers have nice bodies, but there's nothing erotic about the play. This is just the natural way you'd expect people to be when they've been in bed together.
Hare, by the way, gets in a dig at critics when he has one of his women say to her new male acquaintance: "You said you're a writer. Aren't journalists writers? Genetically, they are, like rats are animals."
