BWW Reviews: LA RONDE, The White Bear Theatre

Though written in 1900, first performed in public in 1920 and set in the 1950s, Harbinger Company's La Ronde (at the White Bear Theatre until 4 September) feels very contemporary. That's a tribute to the imaginative staging (rotating a couple of chaises longues around the stage and testing the strength of a coffee table and wooden box to their limits), an immaculate new translation (by Lukas Weichert) of Arthur Schnitzler's still controversial work and acting that captures the fleeting intimacy of love affairs in a space that forces the principals together as much as their lust.

The play comprises ten scenes each featuring one of the lovers from the previous scene with a new lover; who then appears in the next scene, until the tenth and final scene brings us back to the whore of the first scene - hence, La Ronde. Each scene sparkles with wit, exploring the sexual politics of men and women drawn together by a common desire for pleasure - the play is clear in its message that sex is a good thing, an end in itself and not simply the means to procreate and a gift from the gods to be enjoyed free of guilt. That is not to say that every character is happy, that the disparity power outside the bedroom does not apply inside the chamber or that class identities are discarded as easily as underwear. There's free love all right, but there's a prIce To be paid that nags away at all the lovers in one way or another.

Rich Daniels has set Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal to a smoky French jazzy score with Charlie Walsh breathily singing as the ten couples couple, convincingly fumbling as new lovers do, but mercifully shrouded by sheets and blankets. The play makes significant demands on the four actors who each play multiple roles (and the audience too need to concentrate to track characters from one scene to the next) and they mostly deliver. Alice Beaumont, in her debut stage performance, is particularly impressive as a feisty young girl well able to look after herself as she coquettishly takes what she wants from men and William Nash is wonderfully over the top as a dismal poet brokering bad verse into bad sex.

The White Bear is a tiny space, so some of the set changes can be a little clunky and actors do seem to be walking on and off stage rather frequently, but director Joel makes the limitations of the venue enhance the play's fevered atmosphere. The house was full and the audience very appreciative at the end, so one can conclude that the reception of this Austrian play gives the lie to that old title from British theatre and we can say "No more!" to "No Sex Please, We're British".      

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