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Irving Wardle on Sondheim's portrait of the artist
This, as Broadway audiences first discovered in 1984, is the musical of the painting.
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine are not the first to have dramatised a picture (David Pownall beat them to it with his stage version of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe); but in the case of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, they had a particular mystery to solve. The hug pointillist canvas shows a thronged pleasure ground of holiday citizens and children, non of them paying the slightest attention to one another.
The key, the authors decided, was the absent figure of the artist himself, whom they insert in the foreground of their own picture - thus awarding themselves unlimited licence, as Seurat's biography is an almost total blank. He appears, in the dourly bearded person of Philip Quast, as a man for whom nothing exists outside his work; and who does not even look up from his sketchbook when his pregnant mistress (Maria Friedman) announces her departure for the United States.
The show offers rich opportunities for perception games, which Steven Pimlott and Tom Cairns (director and designer of the Lyttelton production) play with great elegance. "I hate that tree", growls George, and the prop instantly sails out of sight.
The main design element is a verdant perspective walkway into which a succession of disorientating properties are inserted. A soldier arrives in company with his cut-out double. There are endless variations on the painting itself, which giant pointillist figures trucking on, a couple of actors freezing into place to complete the picture, and a tableau vivant reproduction whose members break their pose to complain that they have been drawn out of proportion.
What the show does not do is to resolve the initial mystery: on the contrary, it takes these isolated figures and endows them with relationships: a flirtatious wife, a prying little girl, and - in the case of George - the old chestnut of the unrecognised genius.
Spare is one possible word for Sondheim's music and lyrics, which seem to have been dictated by an impulse to reflect the paint's style. They are at their best when they well up out of nothing - such as a model's difficulty in holding her pose - and gradually pass over into song.
Once there, though, they settle into long chains of rhymes over endlessly repeated accompanying figures, obstinate arpeggios or a chattering moto perpetuo, which infallibly slug you into insensibility.
Worse follows in the second act, where the setting shifts to a modern American museum and the trials of Seurat's great-grandson, whose audio-visual display blows a fuse in the presence of his potential patrons. The target here is the fickleness of artist fashion: Sondheim hits this barn door with venom, while also inviting you to rank the opportunistic performance artist with his pioneering ancestor.
© Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
