SOURCE: “Tangled up in Blue,” in New Statesman, October 2, 1998, pp. 34-5.

In the following review, Kellaway presents a disapproving estimation of The Blue Room.

The blue room announces itself in red neon. Yves Klein could have dreamt up the set (Mark Thompson was, in fact, responsible). The light is so blue it can make a scarlet chair its own. It appropriates man and woman in intense weather and a persistent mood indigo. A girl (Nicole Kidman) in a leather coat walks on stage carrying a cheap, pea-green handbag. She is soliciting a boorish cab driver (Iain Glen) in the first scene of this dance of desire, Hare’s fast-and-loose interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1920s classic La Ronde. It is a play that Schnitzler regarded as “unprintable”, and the task faced by Hare and director Sam Mendes has been to make it performable.

Virginia Woolf complained, after a...