|
Stephen Sondheim's latest musical to reach England is like Seurat's great painting that inspired it: matter-of-fact and mysterious, cool but deeply felt, it glows and shimmers, combining quotidien simplicity with the most elaborate artifice.
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) once said that he wanted to make modern people move about in his pictures "as if they were on the Parthenon frieze in their most essential characteristic'': a statement of the most articulate and arrogant precision which his most famous painting, Un Dimanche d'été à l'Ile de La Grande Jatte, embodies to perfection. I still remember the only time, eight years ago in Chicago, that I ever saw this picture and how it struck me at first as being strangely fidgety, as well as grandly and monumentally flat, like some Assyrian relief until I stepped back, when it suddenly expanded and grew deep, and its figures began to shimmer like the trees and the grass.
One of the subjects of Sunday in the Park With George is the human price of such a picture. Sondheim's George is a study in inhuman absorption. Personal relationships become merely a function of art; life becomes both the servant of, and the excuse for, the creative fever. This is not a new idea; what is new is the way Sondheim turns it into drama. His works are usually called musicals (and I shall come back to the music in a moment), but I would prefer to call Sunday in the Park a play with, or perhaps of, music and pictures.
No Sondheim show is ever quite like any other; but Sunday in the Park brings to full flower one of his long-budding themes. Sondheim's art has always been interested in art; his shows have often been about shows. On the one hand, it proves how American he is: his work is, among other things, in the great tradition of Hollywood showbiz movies, which usually end in that great American climax, the public applause. On the other hand, the conscious theatricality of his theatre is also deeply European: he uses his art to contemplate variously the nature of art, the state of the art, and the blissful but devouring enslavement of the artist to his work.
As far back as Gypsy (1959), for which he wrote the lyrics, and Company (1970), for which he composed the music as well, he dramatised the private drama of the theatre and the public glitter which it hungers for. The middle-aged performers who are the characters of Follies (1971) find their identities in the dingy glamour of the stage they used to work on. A Little Night Music (1973) is, among other things, a homage to the theatre of Mozart and Richard Strauss, and Pacific Overtures (1976) extracts brilliant comedy from the use of musical styles.
Sunday in the Park is a homage to art, its excitement, its commitment, its transient glamour and lasting achievement; it is also a lament for the artist who sacrifices his humanity for it. Tom Cairns's brilliant sets are steeped in the idea of Seurat's grand artifice and his cunningly presentational way of confronting the spectator. La Grande Jatte has a pointillist frame painted all round it, and accordingly Cairns's vision is based on a picture frame which opens on to a deepening, shimmering landscape. The artifice surrounds a sense
of life and draws its nourishment from it. Steven Pimlott's direction, precise and inspired, takes its cue from exactly the same theme of art animating life. The artist is a maker: to create is to invade. The first act is about the painting of La Grande Jatte. Rapt with concentration, George (Philip Quast) moves in among his characters, ordering them into patterns of balance and harmony. His own mistress, Dot (yes I do get, as it were, the point), who is his model for the lady with the parasol in the right foreground, is not so much a lover or a companion as a figure in the landscape, an assemblage of angles and surfaces. Dot (Maria Friedman) accuses George of not caring enough: what is wrong with his paintings, she complains, is that he himself doesn't really have a life. But does he really need a life, like ordinary people? Sondheim's play is devoted, among other things, to the melancholy admission that artists can be coldly and grandly self-sufficient. The painter toils in self-imposed isolation while in front of him his picture deepens and teems with the life he pours into it. This is the tragic vista of art.
Seurat himself was certainly an enigmatic figure; a taciturn, sombre, secretive northerner who said little about himself and wrote less, but who, when challenged, spoke about his art with an icy but passionate precision. Roger Fry described his pictures as the product of "an almost inhuman detachment''.
Sondheim's George, too, only really comes to life with art. There is a marvellous scene where he "talks'' to the two dogs in the foreground of Seurat's painting, imitating the deep growl of one and the shrill yelping of the other. As the painter mimics the two animals he almost loses his own personality, and you realise that painting is also a form of acting, a playful but precise act of impersonation. At the same time, the two cut-out dogs become cunningly and beguilingly "real'', and the whole play is a set of artful variations on the theme of reality and appearance. That may sound laboured and self-conscious; it is anything but that in performance. This is an elegant, brilliant, and consummately theatrical piece, enchanted and enchanting, touching the heart and teasing the mind.
What is art and what is reality? Is the permanent more real than the transitory? Is the frame more real than the picture? One of Sondheim's conclusions is that the artist feels real only when, in the end, his own art looks back at him: the artefact bestows validity on the artificer. But Sondheim's play does not end with Seurat.
The second act is about his fictional great-grandson (Philip Quast again), an artist living in New York and drawing his inspiration from his ancestor's work. Or is he? Art, in the curatorial setting of Manhattan, is expensive, self-conscious and anxiety-ridden: it deploys a tough, sinuous, high-brow frivolity which, like the conversation of certain academics and media operators, is both self-reverential and patronising. George II puts on a show of mixed-media performance art; a hilarious parody of the genre, dealing in such touchingly simple matters as the function of objects in pictures, whether light is an object or an effect, or whether descriptions need to correspond to the object they describe.
Once again, all this razzmatazz is perfectly enjoyable by anyone without a degree in modernist art history or advanced Warhol studies. Sondheim may be having a game with the way the modern artist both feeds on old art and uses it for new tricks; but he is also having fun with a kind of aggressive obscurity and pretension which can be spotted from a mile. And another thing: he knows perfectly well that contemporary art, more than ever before, is For Sale: indeed quite often it is sale. A marvellously observed Fifth Avenue party follows, where the guests include smooth predatory gallery directors, a lethal, swanky socialite masquerading as an art critic (Sheila Ballantine), and generally the kind of people to whom the art performance we've just seen is daily cocktail and canape, even though they haven't the faintest notion what it means.
Not surprisingly, in the midst of all this, George is restless and unfulfilled. Could it be that he and Sondheim are both harking back to an earlier, more paradisiacal state of art when painters were painters and when, through a canvas shimmeringly, you could glimpse and grasp a sense of life? I think that the whole of Sunday in the Park with George is haunted as well as animated by this sense of transience: the sense that life is elusive and needs to be pinned down and made to look permanent for our consolation. And, indeed, I have always felt that Seurat's inspiration was the nearest thing to Proust's. Like Proust in fiction, and even more than the impressionists in art, Seurat captured and made permanent the most evanescent and fugitive aspects of nature and life. This is why his strolling figures are frozen in that strange, quivering immobility; this is why he strove to capture the iridescence of light and colour with his intricate technique of pointillism.
Here again, Sondheim responds to his subject with a touch which is both delicate and vigorous. Just as Seurat created his dominant colours by the delicate use of complementaries, so the impact of Sondheim's piece is made up of the cool, teasing, probing words and the complementing, emotional tug of the music. The fact that this music is not made up of "tunes'' is quite beside the point, as it is with Bartok or Berg. What matters is its impact as part of the drama.
I think that when we complain about the dullness or tunelessness of a lot of recent musicals we mean, not that there are no tunes in them, but that their music does not earn its keep in the theatrical enterprise: it is not, and has not, character. By contrast, Sondheim's composition provides both forward drive and ironic commentary. I am not competent to comment on it technically, but you don't have to be a trained musician to hear its dramatic language; how it portrays the rise and prod of nagging questions, the surge of feelings, or the patter of idle gossip going nowhere in particular.
The end is once again both deeply Proustian and cunningly theatrical. The past is recaptured and reanimated, perhaps even understood. The painter is surrounded by his characters, who have been through the mills of time and yet are miraculously young. The atmosphere is poignant, regretful, and anxiously optimistic. I am not sure that I can accept Proust's dictum that art is the only true Last Judgment; but Sondheim's glittering stage poem, elegant, melancholy, astringent and almost comforting, makes you consent for a time, like the painting that inspired it.
© Times Newspapers Ltd.
