SEX. That didn’t get your attention, did it? The problem is, it’s everywhere. Sex, sex, bloody sex (not like that). It’s impossible to buy anything without having painfully perky tits rammed in your face. Largely, they’re Cheryl Cole’s, and very pleasant it is too. Such sexploitation has several downsides – man was I confused during her bit on Save The Children – and one of them is that sex doesn’t mean what it used to. Certainly not what it meant way back in 1900, when some unspeakable pervert in Austria called Arthur Schnitzler wrote Der Reigen, the source-text for David Hare’s adaption.

Fortunately for everyone in a criminally small late-night audience, Pat Garety’s production seems to anticipate every frothing Daily Mail opinion-piece about the growing rift between love and sex in Modern Britain – and it reveals them as crassly simplistic generalizations that pick up on none of the potential nuances contained within human relationships. So we have estrangement – a boldly stark set, making knowingly Brechtian use of the alienation effect, only adds to this – but we also have affection. Often within the same character.

This production’s staggering success depends partly on Hare’s masterful script but really it’s all about the actors’ masterful engagement with it. I’ve seen The Blue Room before, but never in a format that leaves so much hanging on the principles’ shoulders: usually there are lavish scene changes, regularly the ten parts are played by ten different actors, and almost always directors seem reluctant to put quite so much nudity onstage. You know that dream when you’re in lectures and your cock’s hanging out? That’s Oliver Soden, every night, for the rest of this week. I can’t express my admiration for the sheer damn professionalism and maturity of Soden and Josephine Starte, for having the balls to just get up there at all (it’s impossible to review this play without slipping into sexual innuendo – or if not impossible, certainly very very hard).

Soden and Starte play five parts each with extraordinary competence: particular highlights were Soden’s priggish student and Starte’s prematurely aged teenage model. Every character is judged to perfection: I could watch again and again the subtle, eloquent moment when the enormity of Starte’s adultery sinks in during a bluff, achingly boring monologue from her politician husband. And yet minutes later the politician is trying to screw a model, and both Soden and Starte, as they do throughout, prove equally adept at extracting the best out of every single moment of comedy in Hare’s acerbic script.

There were a few rogue pubes in what was otherwise a perfectly streamlined Brazilian. First was the music. Saxophones and sex – really? Granted, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue was a more appropriate musical palette than, say, Eiffel 65’s ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’, but the inevitable connection with porn meant that some of the subtleties of Hare’s text were overlooked. And then there was the fact that the saxophonist would occasionally appear in the wings, which might have looked to a suspicious observer like he was simply spending the intervening time craftily tossing one out backstage. And talking of toss, what was it with the disembodied voice announcing each scene? It felt both monstrously patronising and like a Channel Four list program. Part of the pleasure of seeing the play for the first time is noting the connections, like how everyone is always saying ‘come’, within the neatly crafted plot (essentially a clusterfuck distilled into Russian dolls).

But otherwise – yeah. Awesome. Intelligent and more than a little brave. Immense acting, and some very clever direction. Plus, I saw tits. Two of them. And they were great. And so was this. So go. Come.