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    The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts
    The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts
    The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts
    Ebook91 pages55 minutes

    The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts

    By David Hare

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    About this ebook

    The Tony Award–winning playwright and screenwriter delivers “a witty, contemporary reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s nineteenth-century shocker La Ronde” (The Mail on Sunday, four stars).
     
    Arthur Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as “completely unprintable,” and indeed, its premiere in 1921 spurred an obscenity suit. It was only when Max Ophüls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde.
     
    Now David Hare has reset these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day, with a cast of two actors playing a succession of characters whose sexual lives enmesh like a daisy chain. The Blue Room is a brilliant meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater. With deft insight about the gap between the sexes, it takes the treacherous Freudian subject of projection and desire and reinvents it in a bittersweet landscape that is both eternal and completely up to date.
     
    “[Hare’s] play slides up on one insidiously—always suggesting more than they first suggest, planting depth charges in the mind, subtly laying a minefield in the self-confidence of one’s first impressions.” —New York Post
     
    “In the jungle of this city, sex is a driving force, a commodity and a need . . . This play could almost be a vividly illustrated Freudian textbook: the erotic drive in action, amoral and ruthless. Hare’s version is, in the deepest and most essential sense, completely faithful to Schnitzler.” —The Sunday Times
     
    “Hare—buttressed by Freud and Proust—has turned sexual disappointment into something more interesting, the idea that what we are in love with is part illusion.” —The Observer
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802196439
    The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts
    Author

    David Hare

    David Hare is a playwright, screenwriter, and theater and film director. He was won numerous awards and is best known for his screenplays for The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) and the plays Plenty (which he adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1985), Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998). He lives in London.

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      Book preview

      The Blue Room - David Hare

      1. The Girl and the Cab Driver

      Darkness. Music. You have the impression of the stage opening up, as if it were expanding. You begin to see a GIRL, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. As the stage grows around her, it becomes clear she is under a scrubby tree by the side of a street. She looks 18, like an amateur, in a short black leather skirt and shoes, but she also has an odd self-confidence. A CAB DRIVER walks past, taking no notice. She makes no reaction. Then ten seconds later, he passes again, going back in the other direction. This time, the music stops and she speaks as he passes her.

      Girl What? What did you say?

      Cab Driver I didn’t say anything.

      Girl I thought you said something.

      Cab Driver No.

      Girl What made me think you just spoke?

      She puts out her cigarette.

      Girl Do you want to come home with me?

      Cab Driver Do I want to go home with you? Go home? Why would I go home with you?

      She is impassive, not responding.

      Cab Driver Where is your home?

      Girl Quite near.

      Cab Driver Where?

      Girl South.

      Cab Driver I’m not going south.

      Girl We can take a taxi.

      Cab Driver Take a taxi? I drive a fucking taxi.

      Girl Is it yours?

      Cab Driver It’s mine.

      Girl I mean, does it belong to you?

      He turns to go.

      Girl So?

      Cab Driver I haven’t got any money. I just spent the lot on sushi.

      Girl So?

      The CAB DRIVER looks at her a moment.

      Cab Driver Right, I’ve heard about you. You’re new. Aren’t you?

      Girl New-ish.

      Cab Driver How long?

      Girl A week.

      Cab Driver You enjoying it?

      Girl Once or twice.

      He looks at her, tempted.

      Cab Driver How far is this place of yours?

      Girl It’s ten minutes by cab.

      Cab Driver Oh look, forget it. Ten minutes? No. Forget it. I have to work. I’ve made nothing tonight. And I’m not doing it in the car. It’s the first rule of driving. I never do it in the car.

      Girl Give me a kiss.

      Cab Driver Here?

      She takes his hand and leads him quickly to a darker place across the street.

      Girl Now give me a kiss.

      She kisses him. It’s magical, suspended for a moment. They stay in each other’s arms. It is dark in the street and

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