Ring Ring review – La Ronde reimagined as a carousel of modern anxieties

White Bear theatre, London
Writer Gary Owen stitches together glimpses of contemporary life with a spin on Arthur Schnitzler’s classic that doesn’t quite coalesce

Gary Owen’s gentle dance of linked fragments joins a long list of plays taking after Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, an 1897 drama structured as a kind of musical chairs. With interlocking scenes between two actors at a time, they rotate every few minutes. It’s a useful device for packing variety into a single story, like tossing a big salad of ideas. Though neatly performed by its young cast, this new, modern-day mix by the writer of the incomparable Iphigenia in Splott struggles to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

La Ronde caused controversy, deemed immoral and too sexual for the stage. Ring Ring takes a far softer approach. Owen seeks to illuminate the modern anxieties that keep us awake at night: the things we fear to share, to pass on, to tackle by ourselves. We have nervous couples, anxious about whether to become parents. People working dead-end jobs who hope a shag will help them forget their existential dread. Individually, the scenes are quick and full of yearning, a beautiful bluntness to Owen’s dialogue. Collectively, we miss a sense of accumulation or forward momentum.