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.
Originally commissioned by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and directed by David Bond, the school’s former director of performance, this is the show’s first professional outing. With a hard-working cast of five, it has difficulty shedding its roots as a student show and getting beyond an exercise for the actors to cut their teeth on. This isn’t helped by the self-conscious moments of movement during the scene transitions or the shelves on Alberto Aquilina’s corrugated set, intended as physical reminders of these encounters, that in reality become awkward prop trays for the cast.
Tiger Tingley does the most to unearth the tenderness of the script, first as a harried worker aggressively flirted with on the street, and later as an exhausted parent desperately wanting to reconnect with his partner. Leisa Gwenllian and Iwan Bond also adapt with ease, leaping between charm and anxiety. There is some fine storytelling in Shed theatre’s production, but it serves its audience in glimpses and fragments, rather than as a whole.
• At White Bear theatre, London, until 6 December
