Let's get one thing straight: most people will go to see this, the first national tour of David Hare’s take on Schnitzler’s La Ronde, primarily to ogle a couple of C-list celebrities in the buff. There’s certainly little other reason to bother with Joe Harmston’s ham-fisted production.

The performances (from Tracy Shaw of Coronation Street fame, and Jason Connery, son of Sean) are amateurish, and Simon Scullion’s unwieldy set means that this already episodic play is further punctuated by a series of seemingly interminable scene changes.

Over ten self-contained scenes, ten interchangeable partners share ten sexual couplings, each in its own way at least as bitter as it is sweet. Hare transports Schnitzler’s whirling carnal merry-go-round into our own unlovely and alienated modern times, but some themes remain timeless. The male characters (a cabbie, a student, a politician, a playwright and an aristocrat) objectify the female ones (a prostitute, an au pair, a married woman, a model and an actress), projecting on to them their own fetishised notions of virginal purity or illicit whorishness.

And, in the desolate loneliness that here often follows physical intimacy, Hare raises poignant questions about whether men and women can ever truly connect.

You’d hardly guess it from Harmston’s production, though. Shaw and Connery, playing five characters each, rely on caricature and costume changes to differentiate between them. As the au pair, Shaw adopts a dreadful French accent straight out of ’Allo ’Allo, while as the stagey actress she makes an unsuccessful stab at upper-crust hauteur.

Connery, meanwhile, poses and gesticulates as the playwright and, as the horsy aristocrat, fiddles ineffectually with his brolly. There’s not a single real human being among these or any of the other six characters, and as a result the play, with its necessarily cyclical and repetitive structure, quickly becomes monotonous.

Because the rest of the production is so weak, when the two actors do get around to baring all it seems entirely gratuitous. The effect is to make the whole evening feel sleazy, as if the play itself were simply an elaborate excuse for a peepshow.

Hare’s title for his parade of broken hearts and shattered illusions is well chosen: “blue” has connotations of froideur as well as pornography. It also denotes melancholy.

This production, though, leaves you feeling not so much blue as faintly queasy and profoundly depressed. Do yourself a favour and give it a miss.

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