SOURCE: “Ancient and Modern,” in New Yorker, December 28, 1998-January 4, 1999, pp. 135-37.

In the following excerpt, Lahr assesses Hare's The Blue Room as unsufferable and dispassionate.

As the world knows, the film star Nicole Kidman is in a play—David Hare’s “freely adapted” version of Arthur Schnitzler’s sexual Viennese merry-go-round “La Ronde” (1900), whose ten dialogues have been remarketed in a down-and-dirty package as The Blue Room, at the Cort. Kidman is beautiful, leggy, and damn good at her job. She and her excellent co-star, Iain Glen, have real chemistry, and, indeed, it takes all their charisma to give the cardboard characters and the charmless script here an iota of life. Together, they act out a series of sad seductions, with Kidman being rogered every which way, including up; the duration of each sexual bout is flashed on the back wall, as though it were a scoreboard. It...