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Article source: The Daily Express
Originally reviewed by: Robert Gore Date Published: 16th October 2000 Copyright: Daily Express Article Provided by: Juliet Bravo If it's sex you want, then The Blue Room is the place to be. This was the nude play with Nicole Kidman in the buff. It was the first play in the West End to which men ("I've heard it's very good, dear") were buying the tickets. With all that nipple-displaying excitement it was hard to judge the play in which two actors played 10 characters. The idea is simple. The characters meet, make love and move on to their next partner in a sexual daisy chain. The script - by David Hare - is based on a daring, 100 year-old Viennese play, La Ronde, by Arthur Schnitzler. Now this revival (up from the Chichester Festival Theatre studio) finds itself in the plush of the Haymarket where Camilla Power - much younger than Kidman - is terrific in various roles as a politician's wife, tart, au pair. I am not just saying that because she is eminently fanciable. She acts superbly, repeatedly bonking Michael Higgs in his various roles as cabbie, toff, playwright and so on. Each encounter is timed in seconds on an overhead screen, a joke which runs out of steam before the characters do. What makes it hit home is David Hare's cynical but wholly convincing rewrite, a play about meaningless sex in the modern age. Its cold, clinical eroticism makes it more frightening than exciting. Second time around, the bodies have got younger and the play goes deeper. Robert Gore |