Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Janie Dee, Imelda Staunton and Zizi Strallen (Young Phyllis in Follies.
Vanished glamour … Janie Dee, Imelda Staunton and Zizi Strallen in Follies. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Vanished glamour … Janie Dee, Imelda Staunton and Zizi Strallen in Follies. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Follies review – Sondheim's showbiz stunner returns in breathtaking style

This article is more than 6 years old

National Theatre, London
Imelda Staunton is unforgettable in Dominic Cooke’s ingenious revival of a musical that perfectly fuses splendour and poetic sadness

Although it has legions of admirers, Follies has often seemed a problematic show. Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics combine emotional pain and witty pastiche with a deftness that James Goldman’s book never quite seems to match. But Dominic Cooke’s superb revival, reverting to the structure of the 1971 original and ditching the optimistic conclusion that marred the 1987 West End production, gives this bleakly festive musical a poetic unity I didn’t realise it possessed.

The paradox is that Cooke achieves unity by stretching, to the limit, the show’s obsession with duality. That idea of doubleness is built into the Sondheim-Goldman concept. We are invited to witness a grand reunion of veteran Follies showgirls in a Broadway theatre on the verge of demolition; in the background we see the ostrich-plumed incarnations of their younger selves. At the same time we are privy to a double marital crisis. Well-heeled New Yorkers Ben and Phyllis are in as much trouble as their old Phoenix-based chums, Buddy and Sally. What brings the crisis to a head is that Sally has a lifelong yen for Ben that has never been resolved.

The intermingling of past and present is an idea many dramatists have used, notably Tom Stoppard in The Invention of Love, where the older AE Housman views the sexual hesitancy of his younger self with a rueful regret. Here, Cooke’s production lends the idea extra poignancy by making this interaction a two-way process: at one point, Zizi Strallen as the young Phyllis seems about to dissolve in tears as she gazes at the dyspeptic solitude of Janie Dee as her older but no wiser self.

Peacock splendour … Geraldine Fitzgerald, centre, in Follies. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Cooke’s real breakthrough, however, is to suggest that every character in the show is haunted by the ghosts of the past, something that is true even in the celebrated pastiche numbers. Arguably the most famous is I’m Still Here, which has been appropriated by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Sammy Davis Jr and turned into a tribute to showbiz durability. Here, while acknowledging its debt to the torch songs of Harold Arlen, it becomes something more. Tracie Bennett starts as if recapitulating her career to old colleagues, even making fingertip contact with one of them as she recalls how she “sung the blues”. Only gradually does she break free to assert her defiance and tenacity, all the time ardently watched by a spangled embodiment of her younger self. It is quite simply breathtaking.

Cooke gives every character a shadow-self but takes the duality theme even further by reminding us that each of the main characters is really two people. Imelda Staunton is unforgettable as Sally, presenting us at first with a cheerily smiling soul: her delivery of In Buddy’s Eyes, in which Sally self-deludingly believes she is adored by her husband, had a radiant happiness that brought a lump to my throat. By the end, as she sings the Gershwin-influenced Losing My Mind, Staunton shows that Sally is a lovelorn wreck as her voice seems to dissolve on the song’s final syllable.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The other visible nervous breakdown affects Ben, who is beautifully played by Philip Quast. A UN diplomat turned financier, he initially seems the embodiment of urbane condescension. But gradually Quast reveals the desolation beneath, and in his final number, Live, Laugh, Love, he goes to pieces in the midst of a top-hat-and-tails turn with a conviction that leaves the audience unsure whether it is the character or the actor who is disintegrating. As Phyllis, Dee is brilliantly sardonic in her withering put-downs but when it came to the climactic The Story of Lucy and Jessie, where she dances alongside Strallen, I realised that this is a song about a divided self. The same dilemma afflicts Peter Forbes’s Buddy, irrevocably torn between the stability of marriage and the excitements of adultery.

The danger of Follies is that it can easily succumb to nostalgia, a tribute to a vanished showbiz glamour. But, while Vicki Mortimer’s design combines theatrical debris and peacock splendour and Bill Deamer’s choreography evokes the period precision of classic dance routines, the production never lets you forget the astringent sadness beneath the spectacle. In a 37-strong cast there also striking contributions from Josephine Barstow as a throwback to old Vienna, Di Botcher as a superannuated Broadway baby and Dawn Hope as a resilient hoofer. Played without a trace of camp and no interval, this is a production that perfectly captures the sustained emotional arc of Sondheim and Goldman’s musical. I came out admiring the show more than ever.

  • At the National’s Olivier theatre, London, until 3 January. Box office: 020-7452 3000. Broadcast on 16 November as part of NT Live.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed