Ingenious, bittersweet tale of a relationship
The Last Five Years Garrick Theatre, London WC2 ★★★★☆
As theatre emerges from a period when it could barely see further than the next five minutes, there’s something heartening about attending the West End run of The Last
Five Years, a show that has stayed the course and life-affirmingly asserts the value of trying to connect, however fraught with difficulty.
Hailing from early 2001, American composer Jason Robert Brown’s internationally admired song-cycle is a bittersweet musical summation of a romance from start to finish, and ingeniously, from finish to start. The two sides of the story are sung in contrasting chronological motion, meeting midway at the brief blissful moment of marriage. The added stroke of genius of Jonathan O’boyle’s exquisite fringe staging last March was to make the pair pianists; they took it in turns at a baby grand to accompany each other’s vocals, heightening the sense of interdependence and variance – even when one is singing and the other playing, that playing has a quality of unspoken dialogue.
The pandemic intervened first time round. But the compactness of the show, together with its pertinence, meant that the Southwark Playhouse duly brought it back last autumn. The wretched second national lockdown, alas again, intruded. Still, the resilience has paid off. At the Garrick, the production is finally being seen and heard at its best. The work chimes with the moment we’re all in, looking ahead and casting our minds back, building up hopes, picking up the pieces.
Oli Higginson and Molly Lynch reprise their bravura turns as Jamie and Cathy, the evening beginning with him leaning over her shoulders to pick out a music box-style melody on the piano, and ending with her doing the same. Though it’s a perfect mirror image, the emphasis feels telling. While the duo sing their confused hearts out in ways that will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever been in and out of love, it’s hard not to feel that Cathy – whose narrative runs from hurt back to hope – was disadvantaged in the relationship and has to find a way to assert herself. The end point quietly registers that learning curve.
Contrasting with her plangent, blue-lit laments at the start, Higginson’s Jamie is seen gleaming and gung-ho under golden lighting, set on becoming a novelist; it’s a careerpath he succeeds in, the seeds of later conflict apparent in a charismatic impatience that sees him leaping on the piano like a conquering hero. Cathy aspires to be an actress but is relegated to a sideshow.
Brown’s anatomising of a togetheryet-alone dynamic invites comparisons with Sondheim. The lyrics aren’t always as pin-sharp, and genericsounding emoting sometimes takes hold. It is descriptive rather than dramatic, almost a clockwork exercise. Yet the cumulative mood is as bewitching as love itself – the gaiety and melancholy of coupledom is forcefully felt on the pulse.