““The Blue Room’’ is Hare’s modernized version of Arthur Schnitzler’s ““La Ronde,’’ in which five men and five women form an inadvertent sexual daisy chain that crosses lines of social class and money. In Hare’s version, two actors, Kidman and Iain Glen, play all 10 contemporary copulators. Both give virtuoso performances, switching identities, costumes, accents and positions with speed, elegance, pathos and hilarity. These attributes apply equally to Sam Mendes’s staging and to Hare’s play, which looks with cool empathy at the illusions and deceptions of the modern mating dance.
As a stage image, Kidman is the essence of -escense: luminescent, opalescent, incandescent. As an actress, she evokes with wit and style a teenage hooker, a French au pair, an upscale wife, a coked-up model, an imperious stage diva. Matching her is Glen as a lecherous cabdriver, a callow student, a self-adoring playwright, a philandering politician, a jaded aristocrat. Flinging their clothes off and on with finger-straining abandon, they couple in stage blackouts, to the frazzling accompaniment of an electric buzzer, followed by a sign signaling the length of their liaisons. (Winner: the politician at 2 hours 28 minutes. Flunkout: the student at 0.)
It took guts for movie-star Kidman, 31, to step into the naked reality of the stage in such a risky project. Living in London with Cruise for 18 months while working on Kubrick’s project, Kidman felt the call of the theater, where she hadn’t worked since she was 19 in her native Australia. The sky-diving, mountain-climbing Kidman was undaunted by the relentless sexuality of ““The Blue Room.’’ The most erotic scene in the play is one in which the playwright tenderly dresses the model after they’ve made love. ““That was my idea,’’ says Kidman. ““I thought it was sexier for him than ripping her clothes off.''
Kidman has a special insight into the character of the young model. She’s frank about her own emotional history and her youthful dalliance with drugs. ““When I was 17, I had a relationship with a 37-year-old man,’’ she says. ““Another man was 13 years older than me. He was lovely and kind. He gave me such a strong belief in men, which is a lovely thing to have.’’ Kidman studied ballet as a youngster, and later joined a theater group in Sydney. Inevitably the movies grabbed the girl with the red-gold hair and moonglow skin. Her best American role so far was the murderously ambitious TV weather girl in 1995’s ““To Die For.’’ (Her next film, ““Practical Magic,’’ opens mid-October.) Cruise and Kidman–whose previous films together, ““Days of Thunder’’ and ““Far and Away,’’ were not successful–are as anxious as anyone to see what Kubrick has wrought with them in ““Eyes Wide Shut.''
The director has buttoned the lips of everyone connected with the film (now set to open next summer). But Kidman’s awed affection for Kubrick (““He’s truly inspired’’) threatens to pop one button. The movie, a thriller about jealousy and sexual obsession, involves scenes of highly charged eroticism with Kidman and Cruise reportedly as husband-and-wife psychiatrists. ““Stanley was extremely respectful of us, of our marriage,’’ says Kidman. ““He set those scenes up from the beginning so that he dealt with us separately. He told us, “I don’t want you to direct each other or give each other notes.’ He thought that when a threesome works on such sensitive scenes, two can gang up on the third without meaning to.''
““The Blue Room’’ will run through October, but Kidman won’t escape from sex. Her next film is ““In the Cut,’’ from novelist Susanna Moore’s (what else?) erotic thriller, which Kidman bought for filmmaker Jane Campion, who directed her in ““Portrait of a Lady.’’ ““Jane will push me to the limit, she’ll ask me to do things I’ve never done before,’’ says Kidman. She doesn’t sound like someone who has threatened to give up acting. ““It’s the awful scrutiny of your private life that gets you down.’’ She and Cruise are currently suing an English magazine that wrote they were getting divorced. Their two children go to English schools, but Kidman says ideally she’d like to raise the kids in Australia. As for her husband, she calls him ““wonderfully American.’’ It sounds as if no one country, no one medium, is going to contain her energy and daring.
