From naturalism to the supernatural

This play about a 1970s rock band arrives in London from New York, presumably on its own private jet and trailing an entourage of groupies and dealers. Stereophonic opened on Broadway last year and went platinum, receiving a record-breaking 13 Tony nominations and winning five of them. Now it’s in the West End. Does it live up to the hype?

Well, pretty much. The set is certainly fabulous. Downstage is a recording studio control room with a large mixing desk, chairs, cushions, throws, a broken coffee machine. Upstage is the soundproof sound room, where the musicians actually record.

It’s 1976 and a five-piece Anglo-American rock band, whose name we never learn, are working on their second album as their first, which they made a year ago in just three weeks, reappears in the charts and starts climbing towards the top. Now they’re under pressure to repeat the feat. They drink, smoke weed and avail themselves of lines from a coke stash the size of a bag of sugar. The whole play is set in the studio — first in Sausalito and then in Los Angeles — and we follow the band and their two engineers over the course of a year as their relationships and songs evolve. They may be musically in tune but there’s little harmony in their personal lives.

The gaps in conversations are sometimes so long that I thought the actors must have dried

Peter (Jack Riddiford), the guitarist, is the creative driving force as well as a bullying, perfectionist pain in the arse. He’s the partner of his fellow American, Diana (Lucy Karczewski), a hippyish singer who lacks confidence in her own writing, brilliant though it is. The three Brits are the drummer Simon (Chris Stack), who started the band, Holly (Nia Towle), the keyboard player, who has a strong bond with Diana, and the bassist Reg (Zachary Hart), who’s married to Holly. 

Is any of this sounding familiar? The playwright David Adjmi has said the idea for Stereophonic came to him as he was listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” but the show’s band and the scenario clearly evoke Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, their seminal 1977 album, the second they made after the American couple Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham had joined. (Fleetwood Mac, of course, were the inspiration for Daisy Jones & the Six, the Taylor Jenkins Reid bestseller that was adapted for an excellent Prime Video series.)

It certainly sounded familiar to record producer Ken Caillat who worked on Rumours as a sound engineer and wrote a memoir about the experience. Caillat and his co-writer brought a lawsuit against the makers of Stereophonic which was settled out of court.

In the show, the engineer is Grover (Eli Gelb). Grover and his assistant Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) are our point-of-view characters — quite literally. For much of the show, they’re at the mixing desk, with their backs to the audience, as they watch the squabbling musicians in the sound room.

We watch with them as the band argue over bass lines, struggle to get the right drum sound, tamper with tempo. A tricky vocal phrase is practised again and again. Everyone is exhausted. During recording breaks there are meandering, stoned conversations about, among other things, houseboats, custard and the film Don’t Look Now. There are hints of backstories — has Holly lost a child? — that we never get to hear about but there is a real sense of these characters existing outside the studio’s four walls.

Director Daniel Aukin describes Stereophonic as “a love letter to the joy and the pain of people making something together”. It is intense and funny and there are moments when, in the midst of the fractious bickering and endless tinkering, everything suddenly falls perfectly into place and the magic happens. We get to hear that music — actually written by Will Butler of Arcade Fire — as it’s being made. It’s not enough for these actors to just know their lines and not bump into the furniture — they also have to play their instruments live, and play them as if they were hugely successful rock stars. They sounded pretty good to me.

But there is also a lot of silence. The gaps in conversations are sometimes so long that, initially, I thought the actors must have dried. The play is striving for naturalism but real-life talk rarely has silences that long. There’s a five-star two hour forty-five minute show inside this four-star three hour fifteen minute show. Nevertheless, Stereophonic is a terrific, thought-provoking piece about the creative process and its cost. And it’s impossible not to love a play whose four acts are named after albums by Todd Rundgren, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd and Elton John.

---

From naturalism to the supernatural, realism to the unreal … Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first staged at the Bridge Theatre in 2019, is back for another run and it’s a very welcome return for this exuberant, colourful spectacle; an “immersive” production with a promenade audience down amongst the action.

Hytner’s take on Shakespeare’s magical fantasy might not bewitch hardline purists

A squabble between the king and queen of fairyland sees them meddling in the affairs of mortals and causing mayhem among four upper-class Athenian lovers, at the same time as a group of commoners — the “rude mechanicals” — rehearse a play intended for the upcoming wedding of the Duke of Athens (J.J. Feild) and the Queen of the Amazons (Susannah Fielding).

Some of the actors here must think the Stereophonic cast have it easy. David Moorst, as the chaotic sprite Puck, has to perform aerialist gymnastics and deliver some of his lines hanging upside down like a bat. A sexy Titania (also Fielding), queen of the fairies, twists herself around sheet ropes suspended above the enchanted forest. A squadron of fairies swings through the air. 

Hytner’s take on Shakespeare’s magical fantasy might not bewitch hardline purists. He deviates from the text and here it’s Oberon (also played by Feild), the fairy king, rather than Titania who falls for the ass-headed Bottom (a hilarious Emmanuel Akwafo). And there are flying beds, a shared bubble bath and a blast of Beyoncé. There are even some shenanigans with a phone borrowed from a member of the audience.

But the fairies, who are more edgy danger than sugar-plum sweetness, convey a real sense of other-worldliness while the mechanicals could hardly be more earthly — or more funny. The lovers’ falling out is brilliantly and energetically played. Astonishingly, for such a technically challenging production, some of the cast are making their professional stage debuts. Lily Simpkiss, for example, who plays “painted maypole” Helena. She’s excellent. Take note of the name and get in on the ground floor. All in all this delightful show is, well, an absolute dream.

Stereophonic at www.thedukeofyorks.com runs until 11 October

A Midsummer Night’s Dream at bridgetheatre.co.uk runs until 20 August