Here We Are at the National Theatre review – Sondheim’s final musical is mystifying and magical

As a last hurrah, Stephen Sondheim’s Here We Are is quite something. An acerbic, absurdist take on late-stage capitalism, he was still working on it when he died – suddenly – in 2021 at the age of 91. But it has been given a production at the National Theatre by his collaborator director Joe Mantello that serves it as crisply, smartly and stylishly as it deserves.

In spite of its sharp satirical edges, it feels oddly full of love and affection for a great composer, who even after death, still seems to have his finger on the pulse of where and who we are.

With a book by David Ives, Here We Are takes two contrasting films by the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel and yokes them into new narrative.  The first act, inspired by Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoise, takes a group of friends sends them out in search of an elusive meal; the second, which echoes The Exterminating Angel, traps the same group in a single room from which they mysteriously cannot escape.

When it was premiered in New York in 2023, with a mainly different cast (only Denis O’Hare and Tracie Bennett playing a variety of servants have transferred) and the same creative team, people worried that the music runs out early in the second part. Yet the switch from movement to stasis, from social satire to psychological soul-searching that the structure contains, means that the silence can be accepted as meant. Designer David Zinn makes a parallel journey from bright neon colours, to dark baroque browns. Only when the protagonists finally leave their squabbling purgatory does the colour, and the music return.

The show begins in a mirrored, shiny room with what looks like a Damien Hirst spot painting on the wall, where a gang of sleek shiny self-absorbed people deciding to go out to brunch.  They are led by Rory Kinnear’s brash hedge-fund billionaire Leo, and his air-headed interior designer wife Marianne (Jane Krakowski).  Her kid sister, Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May), a manque anarchist obsessed with the end of the world comes along for the ride, along with Martha Plimpton’s sour, shouty film executive, her plastic surgeon husband (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Paulo Szot’s smooth-talking, lecherous diplomat.

This is a group who believe everything can be bought: Leo is about to open Leo Brink Park for the People, complete with virgin forest imported from Lithuania, and sees nothing untoward when his friends beg him to “buy us this perfect day.”

Sam Pinkleton’s choreography deliberately repeatedly lines them up at the back of the stage (“Back to square one, everybody into the car”) as they head for the road and for a restaurant, each more disappointing than the last.  Each encounter is also more disconcerting, whether it’s Café Everything, where there’s nothing on the menu (“We do expect a little latte later/But we haven’t got a lotta latte now”), or Bistro A La Mode, a French deconstructivist joint hosting a funeral in the back room.

En route they encounter O’Hare in the guise of a sequence of sneering or subservient waiters, and Bennett who sings an Edith Piaf style song of existential anguish. “What do any of us want?” They also meet a soldier in the shape of Richard Fleeshman, his colonel Cameron Johnson and a Bishop with a shoe-fetish and a job crisis, the endearingly benign Harry Hadden-Paton.

It’s the Bishop in conversation with Marianne in the second act, when the characters are all trapped in a room from which they are reluctant to escape, who gives the show a softer heart: in this nightmare, she suddenly asks him about the nature of being. “We are matter that matters,” he says gently, and it’s impossible not to think of Sondheim himself as he talks.

There’s no avoiding the fact that in many ways the show is a mess. Yet scene by scene it just about works, thanks to Mantello’s inventive direction. What makes it magical are all the performances, each essentially taking a small part in an ensemble and making it rich. Their timing and their characterisations feel nigh on perfect. Krakowski brings a wide-eyed wonder to Marianne, constantly counting her blessings while Plimpton plays cleverly with the scratchy entitlement and fear of losing status that lie under her brittle façade.

As the soldier and Fritz, Fleeshman and Dornford-May sing up a storm and make a lot out of very little; O’Hare and Bennett are just superb.

Here We Are is not anywhere near peak Sondheim, but thanks to their efforts and to Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, performed by an excellent orchestra under conductor Nigel Lilley, there are constant glimmers of his wit, and his ability to grapple with the secrets of the human heart. It feels like a late-career bonus, a curiosity but one that gleams.