Arthur Schnitzler wrote his provocative exploration of a sexual merry go round in 1897 and each coupling was set in the same Victorian time period. It challenged the attitudes and morals of the time where class differences and status were the way of life. Michael John La Chiusa has taken the basic ten scene structure and set it to music but played with the time periods so they now span one hundred years from 1900 to 1999. In doing so he tries to update how the nature of love and lust has changed since the original play was written. With a cast of ten, each playing two scenes as in the original, Paul Callen brings this new take on the play to the small Union Theatre but it does not work.
The jumps in time periods back and forth, and references to Pearl Harbour (1942), Titanic (1912) and Vietnam war (1965), create a curious nightmarish images where the original linkages of one person in successive scenes are lost as they are replaced by similar roles linked by repeated phrases in the lyrics. The result is confusing, illogical and unsatisfactory and the only explanation appears to me to be that it is all a dream of sexual guilt by an older man in his nineties? It offers nothing by way of commentary on the way the world has changed over 100 years or the differences between love and lust. Most of the scenes seem to be loveless couplings of rather sad unappealing characters.
