Blue Room, The

The Blue Room, David Hare's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen (literal translation, square dance) is indeed a dance -- a dance of sex in our time. The two actors in the play -- the highly skilled (and gutsy) Christina Dow and Christian S. Anderson -- play a multiplicity of roles in different scenes that unfold with cinematic speed and brevity, all of them having to do with sexual encounters of one kind or another. Hare's text requires them to make love in a variety of ways, some times half-clothed, other times completely starkers. The settings include a waterfront path, a hotel room, a candle-lit blue room, a dancer's dressing room, and so on. With each change of scene, characterization and speech patterns change as well. Thus Dow must play a cockney streetwalker, a dancer, a politician's wife, a moony young girl; Anderson a playwright, a politician, an upper-class gentleman; etc.

Seduction, desire, love, lust, sado-masochism and even romance are probed and laid bare (pardon the pun), in bold, uncensored fashion. The actors also expose themselves with equal frankness and courage, in a production that is handsomely mounted and spankingly directed (apologies again).

Why, then, didn't the play catch me up, involve me, move me? Was it because it made a voyeur not a participant of me? That sex scenes have lost their power to shock (the way they did in 1900, when Schnitzler was indicted for obscenity in Vienna)?

On reflection, I think the fault lies with Hare: he's written a slick play but it lacks depth, heat, ferocity, pain, heartbreak. For all the sexual heat it ignites, there is something cold and mechanical at its core.