10 Rounds, Tricycle Theatre, London

A new round of Troubles

It was syphilis that was passed on by the daisy chain of sexual partners in La Ronde, the Max Ophüls movie version of Schnitzler's notorious 1897 play about the social straddlings of fornication in fin de siècle Vienna. Rather than a disease, it's a vital piece of intelligence that is communicated by the interlocking lovers in Carlo Gébler's artful and intriguing update of this erotic round-dance to the Belfast of the late 1990s

The piece is called 10 Rounds not just as a nod to the original title and to the number of couplings dramatised. Indicating how many bullets the British Army shot into him, it is also the proud nickname of "10 Rounds" Mulligan (Des McAleer), an unreconstructed IRA man who poses as a prominent pro-ceasefire member of the Republican movement. The play begins with a brief encounter between a gabby prostitute (Mairead McKinley) and tough-nut Mulligan, who goes haywire when the girl remarks that he smells of fertiliser, an essential ingredient in bomb-making.

That odour haunts the rest of the proceedings. It is noticed by his next partner, a German au pair and eager "Troubles-tourist" (excellent Victoria Smurfit) who clearly believes that a hard-man is good to find. Without recognising its significance, she mentions the smell to the son of a judge who relays the information to an adulterous police spy (Clare Holman). From her journalist husband (Tim Woodward), the news that Mulligan is back to his lethal old tricks is transmitted, in turn, to a PR girl, to her middle-aged academic lover who is sleeping with a Republican spokes-woman (Brid Brennan), and, finally, to a civil servant from the Northern Ireland Office (Stephen Boxer). By then, though, it's too late.

Modernising Schnitzler has hitherto felt like a mug's game, despite the glittering commercial success of David Hare's The Blue Room. Offering a queasy mix of beady-eyed behaviourism and romantic slop, that version failed to find satisfactory equivalents for the character-types, suffering from the fact that the dramatic stakes are so much lower without the rigid social stratification of the original Viennese setting.

Gébler's update is cannier. Using the conceit of a chain of lovers, and of the carelessness of pre- and post-coital gossip, helps him to highlight the terrible irony. For it's not a game of Chinese whispers that is being played here. The intelligence is not distorted as it is sent round. Gébler's point is that this is a society where good people may well keep their suspicions quiet for fear of upsetting the delicate peace process.

Tim Woodward's paunchy, disillusioned journalist declares that the only power he has left lies in not writing about certain things. When his wife goes to her superiors with the hearsay evidence, she is made to feel like a public enemy. Commissioned soon after the Northern Ireland police Ombudsman's report on the Omagh bombing, the piece implies that such horrors might be avoided, if information were acted on with greater despatch.

With a set dominated by a huge image of a lily, a symbol of peace here covered by wire mesh Nicolas Kent's finely acted production draws you into a world of tricky interconnections. It follows Schnitzler's mordant format of blacking out the actual sex act and then bringing up the lights on tableaux of comic post-coital anti-climax. The final stage picture is all the more telling for being a tragic deviation from that norm – a graphic illustration of the truth that what goes round, comes round.

To 19 Oct (020-7328 1000)