Last Five Years

Less a musical than a song cycle, The Last Five Years is a raw, not to say bleeding, account of a short-lived marriage seen in double perspective: from his and her points of view. The music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, one of a small clutch of American composer/songwriters who labour in the wake, and under the heavy influence, of Stephen Sondheim.

So personal is the show that it attracted no less than three lawsuits when premiered in Chicago in 2001, one of them from Brown’s first wife, who complained that he was airing their dirty linen in public. A revised version appeared Off-Broadway in the following year, and now Matthew White’s production at the Menier, the show’s UK premiere, constitutes the “definitive” account.

The two characters are mercilessly exposed from the start. The relationship between Jamie (Damian Humbley), a Jewish writer, and Cathy (Lara Pulver), a struggling actress and “shiksa goddess,” is enacted in scenes of bitter remembrance around a revolving double bed and the strains of a plangent waltz tune. Cathy begins by singing that the marriage has ended in wounds and tears and works back in time to the first meeting.

Jamie’s opening salvo is one of smitten, buoyant high spirits and his account, laced with an increasing self-obsession, works forward to the present. In the middle of a 90-minute show, and in a blaze of light, the couple are married. An audience can just about discern all this, intellectually, as it were, but the show doesn’t really benefit from its own cleverness and finally sinks in a welter of narrative confusion.

Whereas a semi-autobiographical central character in Sondheim, such as Bobby in Company or the hero in Sunday in the Park with George (so compellingly revived at this address last year), is seen in the relief of the musical artistry of the composer, and his own sense of irony, Brown’s Jamie comes at you undiluted by any sort of editing. The effect is of being cornered by a bore. Cathy’s predominant quality is a lack of self-belief. This is best expressed in a faintly amusing audition song, but the character is really just a series of emotional squawks in a vacuum.

About the music I am even less convinced. The score is notably well played by a sextet on a raised platform behind the set, led by Tom Murray at the piano. It sounds like Sondheim with a sort of windy portentousness replacing lightness and theatricality. I felt trapped in the middle of a James Last concert, or a bunch of Barry Manilow songs with a faint aroma of Elton John.

The musical idiom seems disastrously old-fashioned as a result, and one can only really imagine the show having any sort of appeal to a minority audience of musical theatre buffs who persist in thinking – oh dear – that Sondheim is the way forward and Andrew Lloyd Webber an overrated populist.

– Michael Coveney

NOTE: Due to a temporary technical fault, the Box Office number for the Menier Chocolate Factory for The Last Five Years has had to change. Until further notice, for telephone ticket sales, please call: 0871 230 2616.