The girls are back in town — and they’re on a roll!

IF EVER a revival cried out for a revival it was Dominic Cooke’s 2017 production of Follies for the National Theatre.

Now it’s back for another run, and the Weismann Girls are gathering again for a 30-year reunion at their former theatre before it gets turned into a car park.

It’s all smiles and gold sashes at first, among the bare bricks of Vicki Mortimer’s melancholy set, but the intervening years will once more be revealed to have brought frustration, infidelity and addiction, a set of afflictions to which the night may yet add mental breakdown.

Sally, married to Buddy, longs for Ben. Ben, married to Phyllis, wonders if he should have married Sally. Can they be together? And where would that leave Buddy and Phyllis?

Meanwhile the ghosts of their former selves flit through the rubble, looking on in hollow anticipation at the people they will become. Janie Dee, Alexander Hanson and Peter Forbes repeat their excellent work as Phyllis, Ben and Buddy.

There is no Imelda Staunton to play Sally this time, but Joanna Riding brings a new, querulous neuroticism to the role and her pill-popping, vodkaslugging Losing My Mind is as electrifying as anything in the production.

This is a show that unsparingly picks out the despair glimmering just below the bright surfaces of showbusiness, and never more achingly than in Tracie Bennett’s I’m Still Here.

As Bennett wrings the lines from herself, the song grows layers of nuance and poignantly undermines itself, ‘here’ being technically among the dust and battered velvet of a former porn cinema.

One could quibble that the concluding package of musical extravaganzas, with the stage wreathed in flouncy pale green curtaining and dancing girls preening in peacock tails, comes when the story has played out.

But how like showbiz, at the point of absolute dismay, to draw breath, costume up and go again. This Follies is a gift — and, appropriately, it’s still here.