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La Ronde: Seduction, sex and ennui as a comedy merry-go-round

At the Baxter in Cape Town, a young, energetic cast puts a fresh spin on a play that once caused riots. The result is a hot, funny take on sex as a commodity in the never-ending game of human intercourse. Director Leila Henriques' 2025 revisitation of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen opens with a bang, although not the kind you'd anticipate from a play that is basically a series of sexual trysts, each one prologued by some or other power game involving seduction, coercion, insistence or out-and-out trickery. While there is plenty of sex throughout this play about how playing the game is often far more entertaining than actually scoring, it's actually the opening dance scene that feels closest to a full-blown human orgy. Tempered by astute choreography and performed with intense sauciness by the ensemble, this joyous, energising romp made me want to jump out of my seat and join the giddy, propulsive spectacle. It was in many ways the biggest seduction scene of them all, and I certainly wanted in on whatever was coming next. There's so much heat in that opening scene, in fact, you wonder where the cast's stamina for the ensuing vignettes of sexually motivated power games will come from. But it's more than a mere attention-grabber. The throbbing music combined with the manner in which these fine actors dance and jive not only sets the scene, but says plenty about the moment we're in. This club's beats-per-minute are sky-high and given the rapturous state of the dancers, they're presumably high too. There's a sense of them being caught up, that they're in step with a beat so fast, so furious, so motivated by what's coming next that there's unlikely to be a pause to appreciate the moment. It's as if the human souls that dwell within these flesh-and-blood characters are not entirely home. Whether they're high on drugs, hormones, lust, competitive spirit or simply high on life is neither here nor there. It's said that we live in an age of distraction, and yet here's a cast of laser-focused actors determined to hold the attention of an audience for whom sitting still and paying attention is anathema, runs counter to the prevailing obsession with more, more, more. Playing at the Baxter until 12 July, La Ronde, which shares its name with the beautifully dreamy Max Ophüls French film version of Schnitzler's play made in 1950, has been reimagined for a younger generation, one that – thanks to the pervasiveness of information these days – means there's very little you can do or say that's likely to shock or surprise. Communal contemplation Except that, when you do in fact do or say or show certain things, those young people do in fact gasp and titter and loudly suck in their breaths. Theatre's power is in the ritual of the shared space, the communal contemplation of ideas and thoughts and experiences, and there is something in the candidness of actually uttering ideas out loud that still has the power to infiltrate even the most blasé imaginations and seen-it-all-before minds. Henriques has dragged Schnitzler's original German-language play happily and bawdily into 2025, and she has found relevant touchpoints for a generation of know-it-alls, transforming a play from a buttoned-up Victorian era into an energised romp that is both accessible and entertaining. And pretty steamy, too. In the process of having Schnitzler's 1897 text leapfrog into 2025, it bypasses much of what has happened in the intervening century-and-a-quarter, though. When Schnitzler first wrote it, the mere idea of openly expressing lustful longing or talking publicly about sexual hook-ups was scandalous. When, in Berlin in 1920, the play was officially performed for the first time (there'd been an earlier unofficial performance in Budapest), a riot ensued. A show in Vienna in 1921 did not go down well at all; Schnitzler was compelled to ban his own play after he was charged with obscenity, and he was subjected to all sorts of public abuse, shamed as a so-called 'Jewish pornographer'. And this in response to a play in which any scenes of actual sex are entirely left to the imagination. Not so in Henriques' version. These days, the merry-go-round ride of sexual dalliances, far from bothering with innuendo and euphemism, is replaced by blunt and blatant tableaux of various forms of intercourse, oral sex and other bedroom pleasures and predilections, fetishes and misadventures that leave little to the imagination. We get, in fact, just enough of a hint of something borderline explicit without edging into the pornographic. If anything, these brief vignettes take on a comic energy, as if the audience is expected to subconsciously measure the distance between what's happening on stage and some altogether more graphic version of it that's already been witnessed elsewhere (an online meme, a film, a photo, actual porn). In other words, part of what gets a giggle or guffaw from the audience is that moment of shared awkwardness in response to seeing images from our over-represented private world reproduced by actors who are merely simulating a sex scene already witnessed elsewhere. It means that while La Ronde is a work of entertainment and a provocation for us to pay attention, it is also living evidence that we are no longer in uptight Europe of the 1920s, or even in an Ophüls movie from the middle of the last century. At the same time, it's perhaps a reminder that we are just as repressed as ever, trapped by our inexplicable obsession with sex. And that while such charged-up depictions of sex aren't likely to cause a riot or evoke scandal, they still speak volumes about our secret desires, our quietly repressed fantasies, our capacity to judge others in their chosen moments of bliss. The difficulty of doing this play effectively today links back to that opening dance scene, which instantly signals that we're not in Europe circa-1897 but in a contemporary world in which multitudes of sexual partners can be sourced via the swipe of a finger across a tiny screen. Casual sex today is so ordinary, so matter of fact, that the play's only truly shocking scene is an evocation of date rape, one which feels remarkably like a public service announcement, as though the depiction of some older 'gentleman' adding a drug to his victim's drink comes across as a kind of warning or reminder to the audience to 'be careful'. It's a crazy moment of near-documentary-style playmaking that's so different from, from example, Ophüls' 1950 film version in which the 'victim' completely turns the tables on the older gentleman, downing as much Champagne as possible so that she can, she says after the fact, blame her sexual indiscretion on the booze rather than on her willingness to be seduced. Not only has the moral centre shifted, but our world today is also one in which the HIV pandemic decades ago affected how people choose to sleep around and with whom. A major undercurrent in Schnitzler's play was that the carousel of sexual partners was effectively about venereal disease, that each of the encounters meant whatever STD the prostitute in scene one is carrying will almost certainly get passed along the daisy chain of romantic liaisons. That sort of warning nowadays seems almost old-fashioned. We are so familiar with every kind of proclivity, fixation and fetish, every sexual compulsion, all the possible genres of erotic desire and fascination, not to mention strategies of seduction, that the challenge for this show is to find newness where, quite frankly, there is barely anything left to excavate or scavenge. Is it weird that, more often than not, it was the non-sexual antics that I found a turn-on? Flipping the lid Moments such as that opening dance scene, with its compelling, compulsive, impulse-firing choreography? Or the outfit worn by Lyle October as he performed a gender-fluid character who flips the lid on Schnitzler's too-heteronormative original ('they' would have been 'she' if they'd stuck with the original)? And there was the clever comedy of the gloriously weird game of domestic ennui that Aidan Scott (as a student in sweatpants that seem destined to come off – spoiler: they do) and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe (as a maid who upends the power dynamic so charmingly and effectively) play off of each other in a scene that smartly, sweetly and hilariously topples all assumptions about who holds the reins of sexual control. Ultimately, what's wonderful about this rendition of the play is its unravelling of perceptions, its demonstration that each of us has a unique and potentially very specific sexual composition, that our fetishes and desires vary from person to person, day to day, even one scene to the next. Therein lies the thrill: that each of us is unique, wants and yearns for something else, is turned on by different things. Leaving the theatre after the show's opening performance, the friend I'd been watching with told me she found the play 'messy'. I initially thought this was a criticism, that – yes – the strands linking each of the scenes could be cleaned up, tamed, better ordered and organised. But, upon further reflection, I think it's the messiness of it all that I liked best about this play. The sweat, the randomness, the wild costumes, the DJ who is there but (unlike the narrator in the Ophüls film) has no purpose other than to witness and hand out props, the mysteriousness of what it is that attracts one person to another, or makes them desire or lust or wish to dominate, humiliate, control, toss aside. It's the sadness in the eyes of the prostitute (played with such grace by Berenice Barbier), the banality of the overly-wordy speeches of the husband (played by Carlo Daniels), and the heartless self-gratification of Lyle October's soldier who, 24-hour pass in hand, is on a mission to screw as much as possible before he must return to barracks. Humans are messy, sex is messy, but nothing is messier than trying to make sense of it. Without the mess and the muck, we'd have no stories, no merry-go-round tales, and probably no reason to spend time in a theatre. DM