10 ROUNDS. To 19 October.

London

10 ROUNDS
by Carlo Gebler

Tricycle Theatre To 19 October 2002
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm & 9 Oct 2pm
BSL signed 1 October
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS 020 7328 1000
www.tricycle.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 25 September

Sex and violence; politics and the personal interbreed fruitfully in Gebler's new swing of Schintzler's sexual carousel Reigen- or La Ronde as it's known in Britain.Gebler's play sets Schnitzler's daisy-chain structure of linked coital encounters in Peace Process Northern Ireland where angry Nationalist bomber '10 Rounds' Milligan (a sinister yet magnetic Des McAleer) isn't forgiving the ten times the British soldiers have shot at him. If his own lot's violence is on-hold he'll make a bomb for someone else.

The smell of fertiliser gives him away to the Prostitute he casually buys for sex behind the advertising hoarding, and the 'Terror tourist' au pair who seeks him out in his punishment-room base. With her, we're transported to a whirl of sought-out sex among the middle-classes – McAleer returns as a smug academic, distant as possible from his first character.

Milligan runs thread-like through the coupling pairs' lives – investigated, written about, controlled by various people. Or, not – no-one wants to risk the Process by stirring up ugly rumours about the stink of fertiliser, and his political allies find he's not so easily disposed of.

Gebler's cruellest irony involves the Prostitute. In the first short scene she's all streetwise, knowing precisely how to keep her money with violent men around (10 Rounds is possibly one of her politest customers). Her loyalist Butt-end tattoo's no hindrance for either to casual sex.

Eventually reappearing with Stephen Boxer's finely played civil servant – all furrowed-brow worry (he seems to have a continually incipient headache) – her naked figure now makes her most exposed. Merely wanting a better life, free of the sex and violence that's permeated the play, she ends up the innocent victim. McKinley persuades us of the vulnerability and hope surviving under the brass-tart street manner and gear.

Nicolas Kent's cast play like a dream, including Victoria Smurfit's suavely elegant model, quick-minded if unintellectual alongside McAleer's don, burningly angry with Tim Woodward's political journalist, and suffering the career indignity of sweating inside a rubber crisp-packet for a recent high-summer promotion: triviality goes on. And Brid Brennan's finely-controlled nationalist spokeswoman, for whom the romantic agenda is less ordered than the political.

There's tension between the sexual and political agendas at moments (one seeming casual, the other consciously woven-into the overall pattern). But the two more often intensify each other, showing glimpses of lives lived under dual pressures.

Prostitute: Mairead McKinley
Volunteer/Academic: Des McAleer
Au Pair/Model: Victoria Smurfit
Student: Michael Colgan
Wife: Clare Holman
Husband: Tim Woodward
Spokeswoman: Brid Brennan
Northern Ireland Official: Stephen Boxer

Director: Nicolas Kent
Designer: Poppy Mitchell
Lighting: Matthew Eagland
Sound: John Leonard

2002-09-26 11:49:20