Updating Schnitzler's La Ronde has always seemed to me a fruitless exercise: the work reeks of turn-of-the-century Vienna. But, by transposing the notion of a sexual daisy chain to post-peace process Belfast, Carlo Gebler both discovers an excellent metaphor for the circularity of northern Irish politics and makes the point that bedroom gossip in the province carries a particularly lethal charge.
Gebler's play starts with an encounter between a Belfast whore and a republican hardman who goes berserk when she detects the smell of fertiliser on him, indicative of bomb-making; and that odour links the succeeding episodes as much as casual sex. The smell is remarked on by a German au pair who mentions it to a judge's son who passes the information on to an adulterous police spy. But, although the news that the bomb-maker is back in business is pillow talk and reaches the ear of a Whitehall bureaucrat, no one acts on the information in time with devastating results.
The cunning of Gebler's play is that it gets maximum value out of the central Schnitzlerian idea. It implies that an event like the Omagh bombing could have been prevented if the authorities had been quicker to act on information received. It also reminds us that Belfast is a relatively enclosed world in which everything is connected. It gives us a graphic portrait of a city in which sex is inseparable from politics.
Inevitably some episodes work better than others. But there is a particularly telling encounter between Des McAleer's crudely virile bomb-maker and Victoria Smurfit's voyeuristic German Troubles-tourist in what the former chillingly refers to as The Stew Room: a different place from David Hare's The Blue Room and one that reminds us of the aphrodisiac quality of the so-called hardman. The penultimate meeting between Brid Brennan's ardent republican spokesman and Stephen Boxer's tremulous British civil servant suggests that even furtive contacts between political opposites involve a certain amount of debriefing.
While making serious points, Nicolas Kent's production also brings out the work's eroticism: the actors go at it with a vengeance and, in place of the cutesy sound effects we often get in La Ronde to indicate intimacy has taken place, we here are subjected to everything from gunshots to operatic blasts. But, while eight actors play 10 roles with skill, the final credit belongs to Gebler who reminds us that sex is rarely Trouble-free in Belfast and that post-coital chat can itself be something of a smoking gun. · Until October 19. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
