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"When's it going to begin? That's what I want to know," murmured a seasoned first-nighter in some bewilderment as we returned to our seats in the Lyttelton theatre for the second half. It had actually begun rather well: the curtain rises on a bare box-set of grey gloss representing a virgin canvas; cut-out trees, a shimmery aqueous horizon, a giant pointilliste figure are flown in, joined shortly by Maria Friedman in a bustle, the whole neatly enclosed by a frame. This is the world according to the painter Seurat. And this is Seurat according to Stephen Sondheim's award-winning musical (the New York Critics' Circle, the 1985 Pulitzer Prize) Sunday in the Park with George, now in London at the Lyttelton Theatre.
The Royal National Theatre has done the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre of Oxford proud, from the programme notes contributed by contenders for the Ella Wheeler Wilcox Chair of Starry-Eyed Gullibility to Tom Cairns' designs. But the sumptuous trappings fail to conceal the work's rambling construction: a shortish period fantasy with a modern pendant uneasily tacked on to it.
Though the names are anglicised in Kames Lapine's book (George is of course Georges Seurat himself; Jules is pronounced Jools) e know this is France from the occasional Gallicism ("What is it that you want, Dot?") In the 1880s the painter works at his great canvas La Grande Jatte with its strolling couples, soldiers, young girls, children and dogs, all of whom we meet. We also glimpse the bathers of Une Baignade when small boys freeze into the landscape and the composition becomes the painting before our eyes; but then taking life and petrifying it into inanimate immobility is something of a Sondheim speciality.
From beneath the gloss a story of reassuring banality emerges. George puts art before heart, to the grief of his model and mistress, the pregnant Dot ("Yes, George, run to your work! Hide behind your painting!"), and, like every other creative artist depicted on stage or screen, cares about things, not people. She leaves him for the loving baker Louis, a shadowy character whom we must take on trust; they go to America through the lumbering arch contrivance of a pair of rich transatlantic tourists ("We'll take a baker with us!"); and the second half depicts George's great-grandson evincing the same characteristics in the hard-headed art world of modern America.
This section opens with the figures fixed in paint forever lamenting their discomfort, the heat, an eternally lit cigar. This one-off revue item, recalling the sketch about Nelson's statue and the pigeons, prompted the loudest applause so far. The piece meanders on with the appearance of the 98-year-old daughter of George and Dot and grinds to a halt with young George's meeting with his ghostly great-grandmother evoking Barrie's Mary Rose.
This score is Sondheim's slightest yet, falling back with almost insolent cynicism on the usual mannerisms: minor-key ostinatos, embryonic snatches of simplistic melody, the bustling rhythms that conceal vacuity of mood or atmosphere; as if Stravinsky were vamping till ready. But at least he was. Sondheim lacks the musical variety to avoid mind-numbing monotony. The first act chugs on blandly without emotional peaks or climaxes, apart- another contrivance - from an artificially whipped up quarrelsome ensemble. The verbal dexterity of the lyrics has worn thin (the audience gratefully laughed at "an ice would be nice") resorting to the sort of rhymes commonplace in Gilbert (monotonous/forgotten us/a lot on us). And Sondheim's capacity for both eating and keeping his cake is shown by the multi-media show in the modern sequence: ripely pretentious pseudery or the lone artist's inspiration amidst gush and incomprehension? We never know.
Director Steve Pimlott, the Earl's Court Carmen behind him, is a expert at circuses with artistic pretensions. Decently performed, well in the case of Miss Friedman and Philip Quast's two Georges, the piece epitomises Sondheim's work: cleverness without wit, ingeniousness without spontaneity, up to the minute smartness without topicality - all virtues better suited to compiling crossword puzzles than theatrical creation. But then his onstage characters say it all: "Neither pastoral nor lyrical/You don't suppose it's satirical?/So drab, so cold/And so controlled." Density without intensity indeed. Two and a half hours geared to actors playing statues and statues standing in for humans has something to say about the arid self-regard of the Sondheim phenomenon and its adherents.
© The Financial Times Ltd.
