Mobile telephones are far from ubiquitous in this play, despite it being called Ring Ring, and a pivotal moment in one of the ten scenes comes as a result of a printed email being presented by one character to another. Most of the characters are nameless, aside from a veterinarian called Jessica and a school pupil called Will. Like the play it is apparently inspired by, La Ronde, the ten scenes are sequentially linked, with the first character in the first scene being the same as the last character in the last, as the storyline quite literally comes full circle. The original, as it were, explores sexual relations between pairs of characters, but there is a wide range of characters from different backgrounds, the point being that the need for sexual fulfilment exists regardless of one’s socio-economic status.
In this play, there’s a helicopter parent who has a personal reputation to uphold and wants to throw as much money at a personal tutor for his son (the aforementioned Will) as it takes – to the point where the tutor refuses his offer to double her hourly rate – to secure her services during half-term. It’s tempting to think that a young female tutor spending extended time with an impressionable teenage boy could only end in scandal, or at least something deeply immoral. But the play is a tad more sophisticated than that.
Still, fear as a common thread doesn’t always make for riveting theatre, especially when some characters’ fears are firmly in the realm of First World Problems. A 25-year-old who works for a political party has been told by the new party leader that there isn’t a future for the young man in whatever restructuring will take place. A woman has a series of ever increasingly ludicrous ‘what ifs’ with regards to having children and what sort of world the future holds. Perhaps one of the only stories that I was properly invested in was one about a minimum wage worker on a ‘zero hours’ contract whose allocated hours weren’t enough to pay the bills: but even so, it wasn’t long before I wondered if the audience was really meant to assume there were no other streams of income out there.
The cast do well to embody different characters, making each one distinct. But, especially given how controversial La Ronde was when it premiered, Ring Ring feels rather tame, playing it safe rather than providing the kind of dramatic tension needed to make the sum of the parts greater than the whole.
Review by Chris Omaweng
“What if it gets easier? What if we can cope? What if everything we think is us going wrong is actually just how hard it is coping with all this and it isn’t going to be hard any more? What if, actually, if we just hold on, what if actually… we’re alright?”
Ring Ring, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, spins a series of chance encounters and tangled relationships into a witty, poignant exploration of connection, hope and human resilience.
Cast: Tiger Tingley, Leisa Gwenlilian, Iwan Bond, Izzi McCormack-John, Alfie Todd
Writer – Gary Owen
Director – David Bond
Leo Nathan – Original Music
Alberto Aquilina – Designer
Trekessa Austin – Lighting Designer
Lewi Scott-Morris – Sound Designer
Isabella Garland – Movement
Shed Theatre presents
RING RING
White Bear Theatre
25 November to 6 December 2025
