The ambition and innovation of the fringe never ceases to amaze. After last year’s slickly immaculate yet heartfelt rendering of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at the Menier Chocolate Factory (that then deservedly transferred to the West End), another diligent regular provider of new and interesting musical theatre, the tiny and even more under-capitalised Landor near Clapham North, has now upped the ante and gone for broke, squeezing Sondheim’s most specifically theatrical musical, Follies, into its tiny space.
While it famously took this landmark 1971 Broadway musical nearly two decades to first reach London – finally opening at the Shaftesbury in 1987 in a re-worked version that added new songs and was wittily redubbed ‘Hello, Follies!’ in some quarters for its endless parade of senior women descending staircases – and has also been revived in a Royal Festival Hall production, this new, inevitably stripped back, staging does something far more potentially interesting than either of those productions: instead of being drowned in big production values, it peels away the layers of the relationships under scrutiny in James Goldman’s book with a powerful, close-up intensity that is becomes quietly overwhelming. This is the first time that I’ve felt that the book isn’t an encumbrance to the songs but rather an integral part of it.
There’s also something particularly poignant about seeing Claire Moore and Sarah Payne, two leading West End ingénues in their time, now playing former Follies girls who are looking back in regret at where their lives and careers have brought them as they attend a final reunion before the theatre they once starred in is torn down. In the case of the two actresses who once used to command the stages of Drury Lane or London Palladium, as each did in the original casts of Miss Saigon and the Tommy Steele version of Singin’ in the Rain respectively – life mirrors the art on display, if not in the personal lives being charted then at least on the professional front as they now appear in a venue that seats barely twice the number of people on its stage. Glamour doesn’t get more faded than this, life’s disillusionments more tangible. But it also doesn’t get more personal or electrifying, either. One of the special thrills of Robert McWhir’s production is that the stage and audience become truly seamless; we’re all inhabiting the same space, with the tableside nightclub seating applying to the actors onstage as well.
The only frustration now for audiences eager to lap it up will be actually getting in; the Landor only has 53 seats, and the run has long sold out. Unfortunately the theatre’s website still misleadingly seems to be accepting bookings; and the theatre is simply unable to cope with the administrative backlog of its answerphone and web enquiries. With a five-star review in today’s Times, and a Time Out critics’ choice recommendation, that demand is only likely to increase. Perhaps another transfer is in order; how about Wilton’s Music Hall, an appropriately crumbling edifice of a theatre?
