9.    The Count, a cavalry officer, is paying a visit to The Actress. It is mid-morning, but she is still in bed, recuperating from some (imagined) indisposition. He says he was enchanted by her performance the previous night, and she flirts with him. He expounds his bleakly hedonistic view of life and tells her that he finds it difficult to be happy, even after having been posted back to Vienna. She teases him about his mistress. When she offers herself, he at first declines, pleading an aversion to sex in the mornings. But he soon succumbs and promises to return after her performance that evening.

10.    The Count wakes up on a sofa in the squalid room of The Prostitute. She is in bed, still asleep. He can remember almost nothing of the drunken night before. When she wakes, he questions her about her life. Her eyes reminds him of someone from his past; he tells her that she could have made a fortune, but she seems content with her lot. His romantic delusions are punctured when he learns that they had sex before he passed out. He leaves as another day dawns over Vienna.

La Ronde: Sex and Society

Schnitzler’s play takes both its title and its structure from the roundelay or round-dance – perhaps the most basic and ancient of folk-dances, in which alternate boys and girls join hands to form a circle. The French know it as la ronde, the Germans as der Reigen. The dance is a primal and universal symbol of the earth, the circle of the seasons, and the cycle of life. It has sexual connotations, subversive of the idea of sexual fidelity to a single partner: for each boy is linked to two girls, and each girl to two boys. But it also has cultural associations with death: the mediaeval allegory of the danse macabre takes the form of the round-dance in which high and low, rich and poor caper together to the grave. This juxtaposition of sex and death is at the heart of the play.