LA RONDE
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Date of event:
30.04.2013
Beginning:
19:00 Location:
Nikitskaya JCC Ticket price:
500 rubles in advance 600 rubles on the day, 50% discount for students and retirees.
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The only 19th century fin de siècle Viennese sex comedy personally approved by Sigmund Freud.
“Now, tell me about your mother Dr Jekyll…”
La Ronde Press Release
LA RONDE
A play by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Martin Cooke
La Ronde (German: Reigen) is a play written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 and first printed in 1900 for his friends. It scrutinizes the sexual morals and class ideology of its day through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play offers social commentary on how sexual contact transgresses boundaries of class.
Schnitzler's play was not publicly performed until 1920, on 23 December 1920 in Berlin and 1 February 1921 in Vienna. The play elicited violent critical and popular reactions against its subject matter.
The titles of the play—in German Reigen and in French La Ronde—refer to a round dance, as portrayed in the English nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o' Roses.
Schnitzler's play was not publicly performed until 1920, on 23 December 1920 in Berlin and 1 February 1921 in Vienna. The play elicited violent critical and popular reactions. Schnitzler suffered moralistic and personal attacks that became virulently anti-Semitic. Schnitzler was attacked as a Jewish pornographer and the outcry came to be known as the "Reigen scandal." Despite a 1921 Berlin court verdict that dismissed charges of immorality against the play, Schnitzler withdrew La Ronde himself from public production in German-speaking countries.
The play remained popular in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and especially in France, where it was adapted for the cinema twice, in 1950 and again in 1964. Forty years after Arthur Schnitzler’s death, in 1982 his son, Heinrich Schnitzler, released La Ronde for German-language performances.
In 1922, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud wrote to Schnitzler 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.
