Performance: The Blue Room

Herald Theatre, Reviewer: Susan Budd

David Hare's free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's series of sexual encounters made famous by Max Ophuls' 1950 movie La Ronde is more bitter than sweet. The erotic dance that the 10 characters perform is a bleak evocation of the search for love that is tainted by self-interest and issues of power and control on the one hand and security and meaning on the other.

"I would risk it if it meant something," says the French au pair as she is wooed by the cab driver. And she does, but it does not. In the next scene, when assailed by the student son of the family for which she works, she is both a passive victim of his desire and put firmly in her place in the scheme of things, a Cinderella in the gleaming kitchen.

The women tend to be malleable, seeking connection beyond the purely physical, while the men are predators, indifferent to the women except as sexual objects. As the politician stalks the 17-year-old model in a hotel room, the huge television screen shows beasts feeding bloodily upon their prey. For him, there are two types of women: those you sleep with and those you marry. What choice has his saintly wife but to seek the thrill of the chase elsewhere?

The yearning for purity and romance voiced by the aristocrat in the final scene is belied by his own drunken actions; desire is inevitably succeeded by disillusion.

Danielle Cormack and Kevin Smith play their roles with style, meticulously charting the sexual and social minutiae of their characters. Beautifully costumed by Elizabeth Whiting, Cormack not only looks exquisite but gives bravura performances of her five characters. Playing five varieties of bastard, Smith invests each with credibility and a certain charm.

On Ross Joblin's stark, white set, they appear as specimens in a laboratory, an impression reinforced by the black screen inexorably scoring the length of coition. Each of the 10 scenes is stylishly dressed, but the difference between the playing time of two hours and that given in the programme of 90 minutes is taken up by scene changes that lose the impetus and add unnecessarily to the audience's sense of detachment.