Review: LA RONDE, The Bunker

La Ronde has been adapted so many times in the last 100 years that it can, perhaps, like the casual sex that lies at the heart of it, become stale with familiarity, the story reduced to something akin to a Carry On or a Channel Four exposé about Freshers Fortnight. I confess that such thoughts crossed my mind as I looked out on a slightly Tracey Emin-ish bed centre stage, above which a large wheel (doubling up a symbolically heavy all-seeing eye) loomed, the device that assigned two of the four actors to each of the ten scenes. But I was, as is sometimes also the case with casual sex, pleasantly surprised.

Max Gill has used Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 classic for some characters and, of course, its famous structure, in which one member of a coupling in Scene One moves on to a new partner in Scene Two, who in turn moves on to yet another partner in Scene Three and so on, until Scene Nine's new character ends up back with Scene One's left behind character and the loop is closed. (There's probably a powerpoint online explaining it all.)

In Gill's adaptation, everything's very London 2017 - no Leave voters here, I thought, as characters discuss online dating profiles, arrangements to see Antony and Cleopatra at The Globe and hourly rates for cleaners. That's not a weakness though, as the all-through sequence of ten scenes varying in length from about 20 minutes to less than two format needs pulling together somehow and if that's through depicting (mainly) middle-class twenty/thirtysomething metropolitan life, well the audience at The Bunker (next door to the hipsterish hangout, The Chocolate Factory) aren't going to find that too much of a stretch.

The show's gimmick - no, that's unfair, let's say innovation - is that all four actors come prepared to play any part at any time, the wheel of fortune selecting them with one forced to sit out each spin so the pack is always shuffled.

Given the diverse composition of the cast (though they're all buff and good-looking, natch) comprises two men and two women, with two who would probably identify as black and two who probably wouldn't, the 3,000+ permutations for each show's casting certainly reflects London's heady mix of ethnicities and sexualities. (Though I suspect very few in an audience for a show like this would do more than shrug their shoulders at the "revelation" that desire can cross social, ethnic and gender boundaries, but might, like me, get a little distracted by wondering what non-gender specific name would crop up next after Alex, Charlie, George etc.)

More interesting (and, to be fair, embedded within the four-actor wheel conceit) were issues concerning power, identity and information that kept bubbling up to the surface. Who gets what they want from a relationship and how? Does it matter if we represent ourselves to be someone whom we are not, if the transaction is "body for body"? If new information is presented, can a transgressive taboo act become acceptable in the new context? I kept recalling my reading of Michel Foucault and Wilhelm Reich, remembering, with an inward sigh, that I didn't grasp all they wrote even when I was writing essays about them - so what chance now, eh?

The play has an intellectual heft (worn lightly) and, if it'll disappoint some with its absence of titillation - even the most passionate exchanges take place fully clad in underwear the coverage of which Bridget Jones would recognise - it's all splendidly entertaining. Gill has an ear for dialogue and knows how to sketch in a personality swiftly when directing. He is served well by a cast who have been given licence to bring plenty of themselves to their roles (whichever they may be) and aren't shy of showing that sex can be fun as well as fractious.

Leemore Marrett Jr rolls out a mean Jamaican accent to go with his even meaner six pack; Lauren Samuels does a fine snob of a graduate student with understated passive aggression; Alex Vlahos is excellent as a Bulgarian cleaner who seizes his chance; and Amanda Wilkin is uncannily accurate in her portrayal of a professor with a problem. Of course, that was Saturday afternoon - Saturday night will see the pack shuffled once more, but there was a consistency through the cast that bespoke of their comfort in this unusual set up.

The advent of apps like Tinder, Grindr and new entrants like Bumble, has changed how people hook up these days, but the purpose of the dance remains the same - we all want to be loved and we all, well almost all, want that love expressed physically, no matter how fleeting the fuck. This production has its roots in that universal truth but carries it forward into the merry-go-round of London today - bitter, sweet and bittersweet. As life is.

La Ronde continues at The Bunker until 11 March

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