The Blue Room (Manchester)

Ten scenes, ten people and ten different sexual encounters; it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that takes a lot of overlap. David Hare’s The Blue Room may be based on a play written a hundred years ago (Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde), but the social morals seem very modern indeed.

There are ten scenes and each scene contains two characters a female and male. After the first, each scene contains one character from the last scene along with a new one. So a cab driver sleeps with a prostitute and then seduces an au pair. The au pair goes home and sleeps with the son of the family she works with who later has sex with a family friend (the wife of a politician). The chain continues until the circle closes in the final scene as the last person sleeps with the prostitute.  It’s a pretty grim representation of relationships.

As Hare’s play is a two-hander, the actors must play five characters. In each episode one actor puts on different clothes to show who they are, a scarf, a suit, or heels, and then promptly proceeds to take it all off again. But clothes can only do so much. Paida Noel, who plays all the women, does well in presenting five very different women and succeeds in conveying some dimension to them despite the limited circumstances. The men, however, played by Phil Barwood, begin to blend into one after a while.

Part of the problem is with the play itself; it is a series of sexual encounters, the majority of which are between people who hardly know each other. As a concept it is exciting, but it reality it presents some challenges. The encounters become repetitive and the freshness of the first few scenes becomes a little bit stale by the end.

– Joanna Ing

(Reviewed at the Lass O’Gowrie, Manchester)