The unnamed 1970s band in David Adjmi’s acclaimed Broadway hit couldn’t be more like Fleetwood Mac if they were called Meatwood Flack. Over the course of a year – and 195 minutes in real time – we watch the three Brits and two Americans, including two couples, fall out while trying to record an album fuelled by industrial quantities of booze, weed and cocaine. Two hapless and high sound engineers are our proxies, witnessing the carnage close up.
It’s a fine-grained, audacious work full of overlapping dialogue and bold use of silence and repetition amid the emotional flashpoints, not to mention some terrific songs that sound exactly like pop-rock hits from the era by Grammy winner Will (Arcade Fire) Butler. However, the play’s dedication to unpicking the creative process and the collapse of relationships – even the banal, scrappy, noodly bits – mean it’s also baggy and meandering.
