AFFLUENZA APOCALYPSE
As Aubrey de Mandeville puts it in the great Antrobus books, “God, here’s a strange lozenge-shaped affair!” Buñuel meets Monty Python, courtesy of the immortal Sondheim in his Assassins mood. Had to be seen. Hard to forget.
Stephen Sondheim’s last work – lovingly finished after his death by his collaborator David Ives, and directed by Joe Mantello with fervent love – is based partly on Bunuel’s surreal satire “The Discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie” , and his avenging-angel fantasy film about the super-rich. But don’t worry, most if it is roaring good fun: a vengeful parable in which the world’s insouciantly pampered rich try to meet up for brunch, say ridiculous things (Marinne is having her dog cloned because it’s such a faff moving it from Connecticut to Switzerland and the Maldives so she needs one in each home). The group of five get thwarted in comic sequence and, tellingly, in ways more familiar to the world’s poorest, like wanting a simple drink of water and not getting it, or having a meal interrupted by the abrupt arrival of the military.
Our antiheroes are Leo the hedgefunder and his daffily optimistic wife Marianne (Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski, who gets the loveliest tunes and wears a negligée throighout). Then there’s Paolo Szot as a Latino ambassador, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a cosmetic surgeon snd his showbiz agent partner (Martha Plimpton), plus Marianne’s angry teenage sister Fritz, who wants a Communist revolution or, preferably, the end of the world.
The first half is pure fun: greeted at The Everything Cafe with a cooing “your enabler will be here momentarily” the five are offered a vast menu but immediately met with a magnificently operatic aria from the waiter about how everything is off tonight. He then shoots himself, and obviously they don’t care. On to the Bistro a la mode (“French deconstructionist” cuisine) where the same happens only in a higher register and with a corpse in tthe private-dining room. Then to the Osteria where a Colonel from Homeland Security arrives, complete with a squaddie who falls for leftie Fritz. Still no food , so on to the magnificently gilded Embassy with Ambassador Santicci, where rhey encounter a bishop in full rig who’s gone off God – what with all the famines and suffering – and wonders if any of them can give him a job (that’s funny, the super-rich are always surrounded by people wanting jobs). There’s a ponytailed English butler called Windsor, who I think may be Satan. Or not.
That’s all in a remarkably grand set by David Zinn, gilt curlicues, leatherbound books and panelling. In this our delighted guests finally eat and are seen disposed, as Act2 begins, for all the world like a 17c court painting. Oh yes, the references here here to be truffled-for by the cognoscenti while vastly amusing the masses. Good old Sondheim. As for the songs, which fade out early in the second half, they’re just as we expected and desired of the master: hyperliterate blasts of rapid wit rising occasionally to an exhilarating shriek.
But the point is the rich people can’t get out. Repeatedly the fourth wall, like a force-field, sees them starting to leave the sumptuous scene and failing; they settle down for a sleepover , flopped around like teenagers;. There’s a fabulous dream sequence where a certain monster gives Krakowski the last big romatic moment of the show (she’s a treat all through, crooning “I like things to shine, I like things to glow” and fondling the velvet upholstery). And in the morning gradually the reality of the trap comes over all of them . A bit too gradually, tbh: an hour or so later my straw poll of scuttlers in the Jubilee line jnderpass agreed that Sondheim himself, who rarely outstayed his welcome, would have taken some sharp scissors to the second half.
But we all enjoyed a hellscape of sound, flashing lights, uneasy choreography, and brief love passages between Fritz and the squaddie ; it keeps the action going as they drink out of the flower vase and make kindling of the furniture. And there may have been a moment of real profundity at one point between the bishop and Marianne. Or possibly not. Jean-Paul Sartre seeped to into the creation too, to keep Bunuel company: “hell is other people”, Huis Clos, all that. And hell, we’ve all been in parties when we yearned to get out. But I did enjoy Kinnear the hedge-funder’s rant at trust-fund young Fritz, saying that her radicalism was just like her fabourite burgers, “pink around the edges” .
nationaltheatre.org.uk to 28 June
rating 3 . Really wanted to say 4 because , dear Sondheim. But honestly…
theatreCat 