It has been a week of celebration: looking back on the work of people who helped the theatre to look forward. Old friends. It is hard now to imagine the musical landscape without Stephen Sondheim. Without caustic urbanity and interwoven melancholy. Without music that makes your blood rather than your feet dance. Without rhythms that catch the roll of conversation and, so rarely heard so sharply before him, encircling scepticism and the double take. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot! And a little bit… not.”
Cameron Mackintosh discussed the idea of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends with the composer-writer during Covid. After Sondheim’s death two years ago, he devised this tribute, bringing on board Matthew Bourne, Julia McKenzie and Stephen Mear. It is all Sondheim: no story entwining the songs, no narrator. It is in many ways a trad thing: a medley. And it is terrific.
The design is all Broadway, baby: violet (oh I wish that colour, which haunts railways and malls, would take a break) lighting, neon proscenium arches. There are glimpses of a Manhattan skyline and a closer-to-home pie shop, but the palette could do with a touch of Sondheim acid.
Though Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga have top billing, the show is star-crammed, the sequence more artful than its easy fluency suggests. I love having The Ladies Who Lunch (finely snarled by Clare Burt) just after a Sweeney Todd selection, recommending priest pie; Send in the Clowns is, thank goodness, not placed cornily at the end, but embedded in the middle: another flame rather than the full torch.
The range and the dramatic voltage of the numbers – the more nonchalant, the more lingering – is still astonishing. Bradley Jaden is howlingly strong as Into the Woods’s Wolf with proudly phallic tail; Janie Dee exquisitely nuanced in the bossa nova sendup (music by Mary Rodgers) of the boy whose trousers are vermilion and whose friends call him Lillian. Burt and Gavin Lee, sardonically eye-rolling, create in minutes the whole arc of a cracking marriage in The Little Things You Do Together. That’s another big thing Sondheim did: make a single song land as an entire dramatic scene.
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most successful comedies of the 20th century. In spoofing traditional farce, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off revivified farce itself. It did so with trousers-down, prickly-cactus-up-the-bum, slipping-on-a-sardine, tumbling-down-stairs gusto – and with Chinese-box elegance.
It begins with a tease: the action – leering older fellow, girl in suspenders, cleaning woman in a tizz, couple hiding, multiple doors slamming – is revealed to be a farce within a farce. The neatly punning Nothing On is being staged by a touring company of well-worn actors. One of them whimperingly asks whether she is getting her lines right; well, sighs the director, some of them have “a very familiar ring”. Frayn then makes one of the most dramatic ever of spins. After the interval, the action is shown from backstage, with performers, their lives more tangled than those of their characters, shoving the play on in a whirligig of desperation. It ends in wraparound disarray. Time has gone haywire: curtain-up announcements are gloriously garbled. Props are jumbled. Human beings have bits falling off and out of them, with lost contact lenses and spouting nosebleeds. The categories of language are collapsing: “I heard a box… I found these voices.”
Noises Off is the most buoyant dramatic example of Frayn’s enduring preoccupation with the illusion of human control: how ridiculous it is to consider ourselves in charge, mentally, physically, emotionally. Twenty-five years ago in Copenhagen he expanded the possibilities of the stage as a place for probing philosophical and scientific ideas, by not merely debating but embodying Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, constructing scenes that disrupted the idea of a discoverable truth by contradicting each other. Earlier this year in his absorbing collection of essays, Among Others, he considered the precariousness of the person with whom he has “perhaps the closest acquaintance of all – myself”. Most things – our flesh, our plays, our theories – are just holding operations against chaos.
Lindsay Posner’s anniversary production, first seen in Bath last year, pads around for the opening scenes, its humour muffled and some (not unwelcome) pathos in the air: Felicity Kendal dithers appealingly, a fine contrast to Alexander Hanson’s smug assurance; Tamzin Outhwaite shimmies to startling effect. Everything takes off in the second half and the cumulative wonder of the play becomes apparent: its humour builds as sense unravels; characters’ disintegration is riveting because there is so much to disintegrate. One actor insists on a motivation for the tiniest gesture (why am I carrying this box?). The joke about this backstory man is that he himself is given a backstory. Millefeuille comedy.
Written by Molly Davies, based on an idea from the Royal Court’s neurodivergent associate director Hamish Pirie, Imposter 22 has been co-created – over about five years – by seven learning disabled and autistic artists. It is a singular evening: strongly varying from night to night. Sometimes unnerving, full of information.
Meandering is too forceful a word for Pirie’s direction and Davies’s script, which hinges on a suspected murder, in which the different accounts of cast members are too slowly pieced together. The vivid moments of interest come in direct descriptions provided by people used to being characterised by others. “Normal” is neatly, circularly defined as applying to those not excluded “from what is accepted as everyday life due to their access needs”. Everyone is fed up with people trying to ingratiate themselves with the learning disabled by copying: hence the title; an outsider is written off as a “tourist cunt”.
Learning disabled does not mean irony-free or characters bathed in sunshine: one man explains how tired he is of being told his smile lights up a room. Though at first the audience members are enlisted as witnesses, a curve of the plot finally renders us unnecessary. Which is the point of the play. The cast do not need the neurotypical to applaud them.
Star ratings (out of five)
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends ★★★★
Noises Off ★★★★
Imposter 22 ★★★
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 6 January 2024
Noises Off is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 16 December
Imposter 22 is at the Royal Court, London, until 14 October
