Sweet Nothings

Arthur Schnitzler's drama (originally titled 'Liebelei') in this piquant new version by David Harrower, directed with cool, cruel elegance by Luc Bondy, is an exquisite Viennese pastry filled with whipped cream and ground glass. Wealthy, dissolute slackers Fritz and Theodore throw an orgiastic party where they toy with the minds, hearts and bodies of two suburban girls, sweet-natured Christine and her highly sensual friend Mizi. But Fritz is already involved in an affair with another woman - and when her husband, a black-clad spectre at the feast, arrives to challenge him to a duel, the promise of sex's riotous abandon is abruptly banished by death's inevitability.

Karl-Ernst Herrmann's set and lighting are at first all red velvety curves, then glow as pinkly as a rose-tinted dream and later, when the action shifts to Christine's attic bedroom at home, are drained of all colour, becoming as white and sterile as a hospital ward. The design brilliantly evokes the deranged flipside of romantic illusion: Christine's idealistic infatuation with the feckless Fritz contains the seeds of a mental torment close to madness. Meanwhile, though the more cynical Mizi is bitterly aware that Theodore will soon lose interest in her, their relationship subjects her to a thousand tiny humiliations. And Christine's emotional disintegration is witnessed helplessly by her devoted father and by Katharina, a poisonous neighbour whose bourgeois sanctimony can't conceal her salacious voyeurism.

Bondy's direction is arresting and absorbing, with the quality of a carefully choreographed yet volatile dance. And the performances are terrific - in particular, Natalie Dormer's loose-limbed Mizi who beneath her apparent insouciance betrays a hint of self-disgust; Kate Burdette, descending movingly from elusive rapture to horror; and Hayley Carmichael as the repellant Katharina. Precise and piercingly painful.