Older Frank Grant Russell Younger Frank Julian Ovenden Mary Samantha Spiro Meg Kincaid Emma Jay Thomas Gussie Anna Francolini Miss Gordon/Mrs Spencer Shona White Bunker/Mr Spencer David Lucas Scotty Neil Gordon-Taylor Jerome Dean Hussain Ru/Talk show host Matt Blair Charley Daniel Evans Joe Josephson James Millard Beth Mary Stockley Gwen Wilson Zehra Naqvi Terry Lucy Bradshaw Director Michael Grandage Music director Gareth Valentine Sondheim’s Merrily we roll along was first produced (briefly) in 1982 and tells how a collaboration and friendship between a composer and a lyricist breaks down, backwards from 1980. The lyricist, Charley, is true to himself (in perhaps a rather plonking way -- Polonius is quoted explicitly, as “Shakespeare”, at the end) while the composer Frank sells out to the entertainment business and stops composing altogether. Their personal lives similarly diverge: Charley stays married to Evelyn from the age of twenty-one, while Frank has a series of divorces and increasingly cynical affairs, completely unaware that his friend Mary is desperately in love with him and being destroyed by it. The frame is Frank’s address to the graduating class of 1980 at his old school. He begins by exhorting them to compromise their dreams with practicality, but at the end returns to his own (and their) idealism and also acknowledges the importance of Charley, who he had come to regard as dead. But the retrograde narrative is not just Frank’s “how did I get here?” reflections, since it includes in particular Mary’s love for him, of which he is never aware. There is a rubric “suggested by a play by Kaufman and Hart”, but Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal, which tells the story of an extra-marital affair backwards but not from an individual’s point of view, probably also had something to do with Merrily we roll along. And Tom Stoppard’s The real thing, from 1982, although it proceeds forwards in time, has something of the same theme of uncovering how things got to be as they are and how nobody knows the full story. There is an identifiable autobiographical element in at least two, and probably all three, of these plays, but the late 1970s and early 1980s were a time for worrying about where all our hopes had gone and how exactly we got to be so unhappy in spite of material prosperity. In the UK, the fiasco of the later part of the Labour government under Callaghan, and the subsequent election in 1979 of the Conservatives under an explicitly pro-business, nationalist and anti-intellectual Thatcher, completely demolished the technocratic hopes, still tinged in some quarters with sixties idealism, of the Wilson Labour governments. In the US, the relief of getting rid of Nixon (after he had ended the Vietnam war), and some sense of an idealist president in Carter was soon turned to misery, not just for progressives, by the Iran crisis and the election of Reagan in 1981. Pinter, the most politically engaged of the three writers, avoids all mention of politics in Betrayal. Stoppard uses a generic left-wing cause, unilateralism, that could be from any time between the sixties and the present, as a component of his characters’ environment. Sondheim uses Sputnik as a symbol of the start of his characters’ idealism and friendship and (implicitly) the loss of hope at the death of Kennedy as the first sign of its decay. The last mention of politics in Merrily we roll along is a revue song (set in 1960) satirising the Kennedy dynasty who will be infinitely ready to take over after Jack’s eight years in office. Betrayal was a problem for critics and audience because of its backward-running time, but it became reasonably successful and went to Broadway, where it should have prepared audiences for Merrily. Sondheim certainly used many of Pinter’s techniques for telling the story backwards, so that just enough of what is coming -- that is, has gone before -- is flagged, without everything being tidily determined. (As in the Ring, the retelling is as essential as the telling.) Perhaps Merrily failed because it is so explicitly about the moral failure of success as perceived in 1982, and also about the way perceived success and glamour go hand in hand with ordinary commercial failure -- Frank’s sell-out film is a massive failure. Or perhaps Charley, for all his integrity, is too dull for us to care about. The only time we really get an idea of Charley’s presumed genius is when he performs the (wonderful and heartbreaking) song Good thing going. In Michael Grandage’s production, in the fatal television interview Charley wears a loud check jacket. A note in the programme describes Sondheim wearing a similar jacket, looking desperately uncool, at the first performance of West Side Story. It is easy to see Charley’s choices as Sondheim’s own, with Frank a rather unlikely might-have-been, perhaps with echoes of one or more of Sondheim‘s former collaborators. (Frank’s sell-out consists of taking a music-business job and then moving over into film production.) At any rate, Merrily is more than somewhat self-absorbed and pessimistic, without much in the way of jokes to make it easier going. Some of the songs are of course well known separately, but the music is also generally on the reflective, melancholy side. There are almost none of the vaudeville or Broadway parodies that Sondheim often slips in, just the one where the agent tells Frank to write tunes you can hum. Grandage's production at the Donmar goes quite a long way to dealing at least with the potential misery of the work by presenting everything with a hard-edged, infectious energy and excitement that eventually rolls back to a nostalgic but very moving optimism, on the roof the night Sputnik was launched. Both the set and the dancing were in what called be called the Donmar's house style, cool but assertive. The ensemble performed each transition in costumes and poses appropriate for the next segment (which improved enormously in general stylishness once they got to the sixties and the models were couture rather than the high street). Julian Ovenden as the younger Frank was an appropriate mixture of amiability and arrogance throughout. He didn't snort cocaine in the 1980s parties (I'm not sure whether the line "has anybody seen Charley" was a joke or not), but was an archetypical snowball with just enough charm at the start for you to be interested in how he got there. His older self, played by Grant Russell, was more of a hard-edged roue but quite plausibly the same person. Daniel Evans was a slightly opaque poetic geek, totally engaging in spite of his occasional one-note integrity. He made the terrible television interview very funny as well as painful, and sang Good thing going unbearably sadly. Anna Francolini was a bitch and a half as Gussie, Frank's Broadway-star second wife. Samatha Spiro was an intelligent, sentimental Mary, obviously desperate but delivering her smart lines tenderly. It made sense that she, Frank and Charley would be friends because of their shared intellectual qualities, but that Frank wouldn't look twice at her romantically. She looks like Barbara Windsor, at least in the face, even in bluestocking dresses and long dark hair, which spoiled or at least confused the effect a bit. Mary Stockley was sweetly tough as Beth, Frank's first wife. The rest of the ensemble were all spot-one in the other roles of various sizes. Gareth Valentine kept the nine-piece band moving, almost unobtrusively most of the time, keeping the singers in the foreground. This production is well on the way to being sold out (in the good sense) already. It's enjoyable, but its main appeal might be to Sondheim wonks as a nearly unknown work, or, of course, to anyone who lived through the same times in a similar environment.