Sweet Nothings

European retro chic has swept into the Young Vic with a vengeance in this revival by the great Swiss director Luc Bondy of Arthur Schnitzler’s fin de siècle love and death comedy Liebelei, in a new version by David Harrower; but, excuse me, from which literal translation is Harrower filching his play? Even Faber, the publishers, aren’t letting on.

It’s a glorious staging, indifferently acted by a quartet of hot young performers, with a fatally fidgety and under-powered third act from Kate Burdette as Christine, tangled in lust with Tom Hughes’ decadent Fritz who’s in turn stumbled into a duel as a result of an affair with an (unseen) married woman.

This is Hughes’ stage debut and it shows (he’s scored a hit in the Ian Dury film, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll), but he’s a very handsome young man and he’s well partnered in hedonistic transgression by Jack Laskey’s floppy Theodore, a bespectacled, spiky-haired David Tennant type.

The fourth member of the Viennese party whirl is Natalie Dormer’s gorgeously attractive peach-clad Mizi, more forcefully inexperienced than Burdette, but with compensating personality (she was an incredibly steamy Anne Boleyn in The Tudors on television).

Bondy and his designers Karl-Ernst Herrman (set and lights) and Moidele Bickel (costumes) have reconfigured the Young Vic with stark architectural verve: a circular raised stage revolves slowly in an art deco limbo of severe white walls and a purple drum. The audience sits like an Eastern European parliament in seats behind newly raised black panels.

This places us in a sort of judgmental neutrality while the party swings, the shadows of moralising vengeance loom and Hayley Carmichael’s grim gossip of a neighbour Katharina tries to console Christine’s anxious father (David Sibley).

Schnitzler’s third act is set back stage in a theatre, but all we see, alas, are some tantalizingly lit music stands. Tom Stoppard translated the play for the National as Dalliance in 1986 (with Brenda Blethyn and Sally Dexter as the party girls), but was no more successful than Bondy in striking to the bitter sweet heart of this elusive, fascinating writer.

Bondy – last at the Young Vic with his Martin Crimp Sophocles update, Cruel and Tender, in 2004 – is a welcome guest, mounting the show in collaboration with his own Vienna Festival and the Warwick Arts Centre. You have to say, though, Sweet Nothings isn’t a patch on the David Hare/Sam Mendes treatment of La Ronde as The Blue Room in 1998.

- by Michael Coveney