Roundelay

There’s a lot of work involving older performers kicking about London at the moment: ‘Seventeen’, at the Lyric Hammersmith, features a bunch of elderly actors playing teenagers; ‘Lost Without Words’ at the National Theatre is an improv-based performance from actors over 70.

Add to that Sonja Linden’s ‘Roundelay’, a sort of vague riff on Arthur Schnitzler’s provocative classic ‘La Ronde’ that states its aim to be to address the taboos around grey hairs having sex. 

If it had been a genuinely sexy play about the autumn years, that might have been something. But mostly it’s a series of bland, loosely interlocking vignettes that feature some fairly unsexy sex – fully clothed humping sessions under sheets – sandwiched by unsexy, expositional chat. 

It’s made worse by the interludes, in which Clare Perkins’s ringmistress presents the whole thing as a sort of outrageous circus; but the most outrageous thing is that the actual circus feats are performed by… a pair of young people! (Elan James and Anna Simpson). The suggestion that the other actors aren’t up to it feels like something of an own goal.

In fact, James’s character Daniel is also at the heart of the only two scenes that get the pulse vaguely racing – one in which a widower nervously visits his first gay club; another – admittedly rather crass – in which Daniel wanks off his landlady. 

The fact these scenes do seem vaguely outrageous suggests that maybe ‘Roundelay’ would have been more provocative as an exploration of intergenerational sex: maybe I am just getting old myself, but the simple statement of fact that babyboomers still do it is not a shocker in and of itself.