Love, apparently, makes the world go round. But in Max Gill’s contemporary version of Arthur Schnitzler’s scandalous 1897 daisy-chain of a play, it is sex and chance that power the action.
Beginning and ending with a scene featuring a prostitute, La Ronde is a theatrical game of tag, with one character from each sexual encounter always appearing in the next. It creates a web of connection among strangers, like an intriguing sexual version of the six degrees of separation game.
Gill attempts to exaggerate the chance element by introducing a wheel of fortune that dictates which of the four actors – Leemore Marrett Jr, Lauren Samuels, Alex Vlahos and Amanda Wilkin – will get to play in the next scene. Apparently, there are more than 3,000 possible permutations. It’s a gimmick that slows down the action, means some encounters look under-rehearsed, and dissipates tension. The only tension on the night I saw it was whether Marrett Jr would get to perform at all.
There is a terrific scene in which a doctor and a patient make an unexpected connection in the face of death, but this is an underpowered evening that gives little sense of being set right here, right now. It looks and feels oddly old-fashioned, and rather than adding layers as you might expect, the non-gender-specific nature of the adaptation has the effect of taking the sexual politics out of sex and muting the play itself.
• At the Bunker theatre, London, until 11 March. Box office: 020-7234 0486.
