Ring Ring Review – La Ronde reimagined as a carousel of modern concerns | stage

gAri Owen’s gentle dance of interconnected parts joins a long list of plays that follow Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” an 1897 drama staged as a kind of musical chairs. With scenes interwoven between two actors at a time, rotating every few minutes. It’s a useful tool for incorporating diversity into one story, such as coming up with a wide range of ideas. Despite great performances by a young cast, this fresh and modern hybrid from the writer of the incomparable Iphigenia in Splott struggles to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

La Ronde caused controversy and was considered immoral and too sexist for theatre. Ring Ring takes a much softer approach. Owen seeks to shed light on the modern fears that keep us up at night: the things we’re afraid to share, convey, or process on our own. We have couples who are stressed out, worried about whether or not they will become parents. People who work dead-end jobs and hope that shaggy hair will help them forget their existential fear. On an individual level, the scenes are fast-paced and full of longing, a beautiful frankness in Owen’s dialogue. Collectively, we miss a sense of accumulation or forward momentum.

Originally commissioned by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and directed by David Bond, the school’s former performance director, this is the show’s first professional outing. With a hard-working cast of five, it has difficulty shaking off its roots as a student show and moving beyond just an exercise for actors to cut their teeth. This is not helped by the moments of conscious movement during scene transitions or the shelves on Alberto Aquilina’s wavy set, intended to be physical reminders of these encounters, that actually become strange props for the actors.

Tiger Tingley does his best to reveal the tenderness of the text, first as a hasty laborer flirting aggressively in the street, and later as an exhausted father who desperately wants to reconnect with his partner. Lisa Gwenllian and Ewan Bond also fit in with ease, shifting between charm and anxiety. There is some good storytelling in Shedd Theater’s production, but it serves its audience in glimpses and fragments, not as a whole.