La Ronde: Nick Hern Books Drama Classics

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First published for private circulation in Vienna in 1900, Arthur Schnitzler's famous play looks at the sexual morality and class ideology of his day through a series of sexual encounters between pairs of characters. When published publicly in 1903, it became an immediate best-seller, scandalized Viennese society, and a year later was censored. Schnitzler was accused of pornography and worse. In 1922 Freud wrote to him that "you have learned through intuition-though actually as a result of sensitive introspection-everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons." By choosing characters across the social spectrum, La Ronde offers a powerful view of how sexual contact transgresses boundaries of class. Nicholas Rudall's new translation sensitively captures the language distinctions of the representative characters in the play while providing a remarkably playable script. New in the Plays for Performance series.

The characters of Schnitzler's play talk endlessly of love, but it's sex they are after, and in the end, it is their search for it that spins them off a life-long dance. The moment he finishes with the young maid, the soldier returns to the dance hall. The young wife returns to her husband after her dalliance with the young man. The Count surely is reunited with his friend Louis, uncertain whether or not anything happened with the sleepy prostitute, who reminds him of someone he has met long ago. Was he once the young soldier of the first scene, completing the circle? In the end, Schnitzler's world is not so much an immoral one as it is a society of dissatisfied beings.