Play: The Blue Room

Overview
David Hare’s The Blue Room (1998) is a sleek, contemporary reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, structured as a chain of ten intimate encounters that link disparate social worlds through sex and conversation. Two actors play all ten roles, five men and five women, underscoring the fluidity of desire and the theatricality of social identities. Hare updates Schnitzler’s fin-de-siècle types to late-1990s urban life, folding in media glare, political scandal, and celebrity culture while preserving the original’s circular design: the final scene loops back to the first, binding the characters in a ring of longing and consequence.

Structure and Plot
Each scene is a duologue that pivots around a sexual encounter, often shown in the swiftest strokes, and focuses on what is said before and, crucially, after. A young sex worker meets a taxi driver; the taxi driver then encounters an au pair; the au pair slips into an affair with a student; the student seduces a married woman; the married woman seeks thrill and solace with a politician; the politician is dazzled by a model; the model uses a playwright; the playwright engages an actress; the actress is entertained by an aristocrat; and the aristocrat returns to the sex worker, closing the circle. The rooms change, flats, hotel suites, backstage spaces, and yet a single “blue” mood unifies them, a twilight zone where people try on versions of themselves and are momentarily seen.

Encounters in Motion
Hare crafts each pairing as a study in power and misrecognition. In one, a nervous student believes himself sophisticated while revealing his inexperience; in another, a married woman treats infidelity like self-care, only to confront the emptiness afterward. The politician speaks in practiced cadences and euphemisms, treating intimacy as a performance to be managed. A model measures connection by visibility and leverage, acutely aware of being both commodity and controller. A playwright confuses confession with honesty and the actress turns that confusion back on him, exposing how art can aestheticize exploitation. By the time an aristocrat’s jaded connoisseurship brings him to the first woman, the audience recognizes a complete circuit of appetite, transaction, fantasy, and fallout.

Themes
The Blue Room maps desire across class and profession, showing how sex both collapses and reinforces social difference. It probes consent and agency in situations where one party holds cultural capital, money, or fame. Hare’s dialogue is crisp, mordant, and fluently contemporary, attuned to how people varnish shame with irony and use wit to disguise fear. The play continually flips who appears powerful: the supposedly worldly are often exposed as needy; the apparently vulnerable wield control through candor, indifference, or a price. Loneliness hums beneath the trysts, as characters come to each encounter seeking not only pleasure but recognition. The circular ending suggests that the players change partners but rarely shed their patterns.

Staging and Impact
The piece is designed for agility: two performers slip through rapid costume and physical transformations, making the play a showcase for virtuosity and for theater’s ability to suggest entire worlds with minimal means. When first produced in 1998, it became a cultural flashpoint for its frankness and star casting, but its staying power lies in the precision of its portraits and the elegance of its mechanism. By compressing a city’s worth of encounters into one “blue” continuum, Hare reveals how intimacy, commerce, and self-invention intertwine, and how the stories people tell themselves in private rooms echo through public lives.