Review - The Blue Room at The Swan Theatre, Worcester, until Saturday, May 3.
THIS was amateur drama at its best.
Two cast members, Emily Portsmouth and Bob Churchill, played five different parts each, within ten scenes. They had huge dialogue and multi-characters to handle as well as full frontal nudity - awful if the slightest bit of self-consciousness was evident. But it wasn't, so well done to them!
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The play itself invites the audience to become voyeurs in the most intimate aspects of people's sex lives.
David Hare's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's series of sketches Reigen, purports to study "the gulf between what we imagine, what we remember and what we actually experience" in ten rather harsh ways of getting laid!
Many of the explicit sex scenes of lust without tenderness seem demeaning to women with the man nearly always in the dominant position. Unsurprisingly when the play premiered in Vienna in 1921 the police shut it down and prosecuted the actors for obscenity.
However, the Swan Theatre's bravely ambitious production, directed by Chris Jaeger, lived up to the modern day challenge.
Last but not least, a special mention must go to the live band, on stage throughout behind a very effective gauze.
Without those splendid jazz musicians to entertain and distract, the multiple scene changes would have been very tiresome.
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