The Blue Room - Review

It is blue. Audiences who were underwhelmed by The Blue Room - the London-born Nicole Kidman vehicle that landed on Broadway this winter to hype of NASA-scale proportions - have to credit it with truth-in-advertising, at least to this extent. David Hare's mildly risque drama has caused such a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, due to its high-profile leading lady and her onstage dishabille, that it hardly bears analyzing as a production at all - first and foremost, it has been a phenomenon, along the lines of melatonin, or the Spice Girls.

Nevertheless, anyone who actually managed to see the play, which is an updating of Arthur Schnitzler's turn-of-the-century classic La Ronde, can testify to the color. The show's two actors flesh out the ungainly truths of human passion against a backdrop and on a stage that are decidedly blue. Bars of red and blue neon, crooked from the proscenium, complete the set's three walls with the hint of a fourth, emphasizing the play's sole message: we are all imprisoned within our sexuality.

The theme is embedded in a conceit so high-concept it is actually geometric. Two actors (Kidman and Iain Glen) portray a linked series of lovers - a prostitute solicits a taxi driver, who seduces an au pair, who accepts the attentions of her employer's son, who lures a married woman to an assignation, and so on, until finally the daisy chain loops back on itself, arriving once again at the prostitute. This ironic symmetry gives the audience a sort of bird's-eye view on human passion, which begins to seem ridiculous and slightly pathetic.

This elegant structure, which implies world-weary cynicism as surely as a circle implies [Pi], ultimately prevents the play from advancing on any other front. The discontinuity of the narrative and the narrow focus on one aspect of human experience - sex - undermine the characterizations and frustrate theatrical tension. One might be vaguely curious about the self-important politician (Glen with a paunch and Scottish accent) who finds himself doing drugs in a motel room with a dim-witted teen-age model (Kidman in a miniskirt, boots, and fishnet stockings), but, like all the play's scenarios, the encounter seems arbitrary; there is no point in wondering whether the politician's behavior will collapse a government or devastate his sweet, adulterous wife (a demure Kidman in a white nightgown), because the story seems to have no reality beyond the spotlight.

Moreover, Hare, the acclaimed author of plays like Racing Demon and Skylight, has failed, or perhaps didn't bother, to give his ten lusting couples dialogue that is interesting of itself. Bursts of color feel like an awkward bid for topicality ("Madonna wears one!" the politician's wife says defensively, defending her black negligee to her gangly lover). And occasional philosophical musings trail off lamely, too fitful and desultory to generate the noncarnal resonances the play sorely needs. "Do you think any of us is just one person?" muses a brittle aristocrat (Glen with a pinstripe suit and slicked-back hair), but this metaphysical speculation seems fuzzy, and ultimately meaningless, compared to the ruthless precision of serial courtship.

As directed by Sam Mendes (who also staged the current Broadway Cabaret, another Anglo-American smash), Kidman and Glen struggle gamely to give the production some dramatic substance. With a workmanlike thoroughness, they alter their diction and mannerisms for each new role - for example, Kidman drops her voice at least half an octave and adopts a suitably tailored upper-class accent to portray an affected starlet who carries a teddy bear to surreptitious trysts.

Such faultless chameleonism notwithstanding, none of the episodes of lovemaking seem connected to a larger reality, a flaw that ultimately undermines the governing circle motif. The snake-with-its-tail-in-its-mouth image is meaningless as a pure abstraction; it unnerves us only when we imagine it to be a real phenomenon. But Hare's scenes feel quarantined from life; compared to Max Ophuls's richly textured 1950 film La Ronde, which follows its lovers' relay through the social strata and ornate interiors of a romantic Vienna, The Blue Room has the stagy flatness of pop-up book.

Just as the force of the ronde motif diminishes when disconnected from a world, so the interest of The Blue Room pales when the production is considered apart from its context. More intriguing than script, performances, or directorial touches are the parallels and contrasts between The Blue Room's early circumstances and those of Schnitzler's original. Conscious of fin-de-siecle Vienna's stifling mores, Schnitzler initially distributed a private edition only to friends, in 1903; early stagings, from 1912 on, provoked riots and banning. Hare, on the other hand, saw his play vault to the cover of Newsweek, and earned himself a profile in the New York Times Magazine.

Of course, you could say both playwrights wrote in an atmosphere of millennial malaise. Schnitzler faced the birth throes of modernism, the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud's innovations, and impending European disaster. Hare, and the rest of us, have the Y2K problem.

The anxieties of a transitional age pervaded another recent dramatization of passion: Jean Racine's Phedre, performed by Britain's Almeida Theatre, using a subtly eloquent new translation by Ted Hughes (subsequently published in book form by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The production (directed by Jonathan Kent) touched down briefly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January.

The Athens depicted in this seventeenth-century French tragedy is poised on the verge of a new dispensation: its longtime king, Theseus (Julian Glover, in the Almeida production), is missing in action. His restless heir, Hippolytus (Toby Stephens), feels excluded from the age of glory. "My story contains not one monster," he complains in the play's first scene, measuring himself against his father, who vanquished the Minotaur and other epic-style villains.

The ensuing tale of tortured, illicit love unwinds just beyond mythology's border. Phedre (a rather wooden Diana Rigg), who lusts after her stepson, but conspires to accuse him falsely after Theseus's return, finds that she has become the monster that was missing from Hippolytus' story. "My own craving fills me with horror," she says, and throughout the tragedy, infatuation inspires self-disgust.

In the Almeida's extraordinarily wrong-headed staging, in which actors rarely looked at the people they were speaking to, this disgust was given physical expression by a massive palace wall whose corner protruded in trompe l'oeil perspective. (At one point, two characters actually conducted an intimate tete-a-tete from opposite sides of the corner.) This telling bit of masonry, which made the show as physically cramped as it was emotionally shallow, testified grotesquely to sexuality as confinement - a bloated, terrifying version of the walls only hinted at in The Blue Room. Perhaps the prospect of a new millennium - another thousand years of possibility - has made us all the more aware of our own physical and emotional limitations, a ready audience for plays that show love to be a jail cell.

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