La Ronde

About

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) wrote La Ronde at the end of the 19th century, but he did not have the courage to present it to the public at that time. The play was staged only two decades later, in Vienna and Berlin, resulting in a scandal that ended with a fight and charges brough against the theatre management, the author and actors. While such a fuss is hardly conceivable today, Schnitzler’s “ronde” (or whirl) of ten dialogues remains, surprisingly, no less provocative. The set of closed encounters, each involving a sexual intercourse, is mutually interconnected more than might seem at first glance: not only one of the characters in each act appears in the following one, but there are also layered and recurrent motives and topics, of which sex is just one. Indeed, Schnitzler explores primarily social inequality, predetermined scenarios, the inability to abandon established routines, as well as love, loneliness, aging and death. Read superficially, the play is about sex; yet a deeper insight – pursued by the French director Arthur Nauzyciel on the stage of the Estates Theatre – gives an account of the society at the turn of centuries, and time. Everyone seems to be on the run from something that never happened to places that never existed...

The play of the Austrian dramatist and prose writer was newly translated to Czech by Pavel Novotný (1976), a poet and Germanist and holder of the Magnesia Litera award, who pays special attention to the onomatopoeic qualities of the Czech language. Schnitzler’s La Ronde brings a new director to the NT Drama after a long time – the distinguished French stage director Arthur Nauzyciel, director of the Théâtre National de Bretagne (National Theatre of Brittany – TNB), acknowledged for highly stylised dramatic expression and meticulous work with literary texts. Indeed, the omnipresent emptiness of human relationships, nowadays often reduced to mere satiation of erotic and sexual needs, has been a theme he has focused on in several of his previous productions. Nauzyciel’s La Dame aux Camélias was a great theatre event in France before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Official photos: Petr Neubert

WARNING: We use special smoke and olfactory effects and lamp. Suitable for audience from 15 years.

The production is created in co-production with the Théâtre National de Bretagne (TNB) and is financially supported by the National Theatre Benefactors' Club.