Schnitzler once observed that ‘what lies at the deepest level of human nature is the fear of death’ – a primal instinct more profound even than the sexual desire that apparently brings the characters in La Ronde together. Though they talk of love, it is not love that they seek (‘Love is, in fact, always a symbol for something else,’ Schnitzler noted in his diary in 1895); nor, in the end, is it even sex itself. As the illusions of romance are stripped away, what is left is hunger for connection, for a moment of intensity which is also a moment of oblivion. As Schnitzler’s characters grope blindly for each other, they are really trying to stave off death – yet they seem to sense that, in that very act, they are merely taking one more step towards the grave. Preoccupied with the passing of time, they are constantly asking or reminding each other what the time is and anxious at the unexpected lateness of the hour; the fading or dimming of daylight, and the gathering of darkness, is another recurring motif. Death also stalks the play in the form of the unspoken fear of syphilis (still incurable in the 1890s): ‘God knows what kind of girl she is – Dear God . . . it was all so quick . . . not very careful of me’ is the Husband’s first thought after sex with the Sweet Young Thing. We are reminded how few degrees of separation stand between the top and bottom of society, and of the potentially fatal permeability of barriers of class, wealth and marital fidelity. Schnitzler wrote in his diary on 25 March 1895:

With M[i]z[zi] R[einhard], at our usual place. Some of it was amazing; the rest of the time she went on at me for no reason, until she had to get dressed and leave. When she’d gone, I broke down and wept at the sadness and littleness of it all, and how these things are really the seeds of slow and certain death. Death is certain, all right; you’ve just got to remember that, even in the first full bloom of a new affair – you can feel him sitting there. Because each relationship carries its death right from birth, just as people do.

Sex stands as a surrogate for death in La Ronde: the great leveller, the common denominator. It is, in the full sense of the word, a consummation, like death itself – the thing to which everything the characters do and say ultimately leads. In a play which is all talk, the only thing that happens is the sex. When all the lying and verbal jousting ends, and there is nothing more to be said, Schnitzler’s text has a row of mute dots.