Reigen, by Arthur Schnitzler
Performed in the original German. Burton Taylor Theatre, 13th - 17th February 2001

It's a delicate task for a director to provide for the bedroom scene in a play: done realistically, it requires extraordinary mutual trust by the actors, and all too easily sexual energy morphs into comic relief. But if one such scene is difficult enough to handle, what to do with ten of them? This is the challenge that Arthur Schnitzler poses with Reigen - a series of sex scenes in a variety of places between a variety of people. The Oxford German Players' production of this 1897 scandal play presents a compromise between realistic and farcical elements.
The play's content is its structure: in each of a sequence of ten scenes, two people have sex; one of the pair then forms half of a new couple with a different partner in the next scene. "Reigen" means "roundelay", a dance in a circle that ends where it has begun. Thus this chain of partners also ends with the figure it started with: a prostitute - a male prostitute ("Strichjunge") in this production. Schnitzler forms a portrait of society from the different attitudes of his characters to desire and love, from the clash between these attitudes and social conventions which occurs at every turn, and the hypocrisy involved in this contradiction. Though written in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the play is essentially timeless, as proven by the success of David Hare's 1998 adaptation The Blue Room.

Schnitzler's couples are united in a positive way united by sexual energy - though the roughness of some of the men sometimes approaches rape. The director Victoria Martin elaborates on the roughness of the sexual encounters - they are all fast and mostly clumsy. This disturbing quality pervades the play; all the changes of scenery are carried out loudly and in broad light, accompanied by snatches of pop and kitsch. Most of the male figures are caricatures: radically aggressive, unbearably hypocritical, or simply ludicrous. All the female characters, however, are simple and honest about their feelings - most convincingly Gussie Seymour as "Junge Frau", who gives a splendid performance. It is only at the end that the male characters, too, strike a serious chord, namely in the encounter between the "Strichjunge" of the beginning (Matt Chapman) and the "Graf" (Tony Phelan, great acting!).

Does it pay to sit through one and a half hours of a German play? You won't roll on the floor with laughter, but there are moments. Go there and enjoy brushing up your Schnitzler!

Michael Sommer, 13 / 02 / 01