Review: La Ronde

La Ronde was originally written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 and looked at the romantic entanglements of ten characters in fin de siecle Vienna, to great controversy. This new reworking by Max Gill, showing at the Bunker Theatre, strips the play down to four actors playing the ten roles, with who playing what left broadly to chance.

The result is rather marvellous.

The Bunker Theatre describe it thus:

London, 2017. The disparate lives of the city’s inhabitants are thrown together by the caprice of desire and fate.  How does your desire define you?

With four actors to play the cast of ten and roles selected with a roulette, our LA RONDE embraces life’s game of chance and the blindness of desire and fortune.

This portrait of the human need for another boldly reimagines the infamous original to interrogate modern attitudes to gender, sexuality, and social status. With over three thousand different versions of the show, which story will you see? 

This rather vague description gives you a location and a concept, but not much else to work with. As a result, and not knowing the original play, I went into La Ronde blind. It was my first visit to the Bunker Theatre as well, so what to expect from my afternoon out was a complete mystery...

Well, the Bunker itself is a really interesting space, and it's very easy to walk past the ramp down to it without realising that anything is there. This would be your loss. It's a quirky little venue, and I look forward to returning to it.

Now for La Ronde.

Given the nature of the play, it is difficult to talk about the cast - Leemore Marrett Jr., Lauren Samuels, Alexander Vlahos, Amanda Wilkin - in terms of how they develop one specific role. Instead, you just have to nod to four individuals accomplishing something of serious technical difficultly, and doing so in a way that is both entertaining and, ultimately, painfully human. The fact that each role becomes gender neutral through this process is also very pleasing, and the writing made it possible for this shift to pass by, almost under the radar, something which seems to tie in with the current trend - across London's theatre scene at least - for a more diverse representation of gender alignments and sexual orientations.

I found myself marvelling at the technicality of the show as a whole. The execution of a chance-based concept is elegantly managed, and the actors rise to the challenge of not knowing exactly which play they are going to perform.  La Ronde manages to be both tremendously clever and accessible to a wide audience through its natural humour, and I hope it is indicative of great things to come for both Max Gill and the Bunker Theatre.

4/5: Cleverly structured and wonderfully executed: a must-see.
The Bunker Theatre
Until 11th March