THE GUARDIAN****
Michael Billington
One of the pleasures of A Weekend in the Country, the second most famous song in this Stephen Sondheim musical, is that of "watching little things grow". And, like a previous transfer from the Menier Chocolate Factory, La Cage aux Folles, Trevor Nunn's delicious production of this mordant classic has effortlessly expanded to fill its new space.
Nunn treats Hugh Wheeler's book, drawn from an Ingmar Bergman movie, as seriously as he does Sondheim's music and lyrics. In other words, the show is propelled by character as much as by song. Much of the plot revolves around the gradual coming together of the touring thesp, Desiree Armfeldt, and her quondam lover, Frederik, now hitched to an 18-year-old bride. The wondrously Junoesque Hannah Waddingham and the elegantly benign Alexander Hanson from their first encounter suggest the laughing complicity of genuine partners. You believe totally in their relationship; and even the show's big number, Send In The Clowns, memorably delivered by Waddingham, here seems less a cry of despair than a brief detour in their inevitable reunion.
To emphasise the drama is not to downplay the wit of Sondheim's lyrics or the ravishing beauty of his score with its echoes of Ravel and Rosenkavalier. It is also a musical that combines midsummer magic and melancholy with a sense of impending death. You see this most clearly in Maureen Lipman's exquisite portrayal of Madame Armfeldt, who starts out as the epitome of patrician hauteur, with her cut-glass vowels and worldly wisdom, and who ends as an old woman stoically accepting mortality. Under the show's celebration of sensuous delights, there is, as in all good comedy, a silvery sadness perfectly epitomised by Kelly Price's rather overlooked performance as the masochistic wife of a faithless count. Sondheim once characterised the show as "whipped cream and knives"; and both are here ideally balanced, as is the sound through the simple device of having the band placed behind the singers. The result is an evening of refined enchantment.
DAILY TELEGRAPH ****
Charles Spencer
Sometimes the only course of action is to put your hand up and say "Sorry, I got it badly wrong".
Last December I gave Trevor Nunn's production of A Little Night Music at the Menier Chocolate Factory a pretty ferocious roasting. The seats were hard, the theatre was hot, and like almost all Trevor Nunn's productions it was too long. None of that excuses an ill-tempered and imperceptive review.
Seeing it again, in a West End theatre that provides a far more congenial setting for a work set in the early years of the 20th century, I found myself almost continually entranced, though Sondheim's dry sophistication and slightly show-offy lyrical clever-cleverness still occasionally grated on my nerves. I welcome a dash of vulgarity and sentimental warmth in my musicals which this knowing and self-consciously tasteful show is unable to satisfy. I concede, however, that in a West End awash with back-catalogue pop songs, and noisy men strutting around the stage in outrageous drag, a little melodic and lyrical sophistication might be just what many theatre-goers crave.
Based on Ingmar Bergman's film, Smiles of a Summer Night, the musical, with much of the score set in haunting waltz time, aches with bittersweet regret and longing, as a lawyer meets his former actress mistress, and both realise that the old fires still burn and that their new partners are entirely wrong for them. Though not quite achieving the effect of "whipped cream with knives" described by the show's first director Hal Prince back in 1973 (a bit of relief really as it sounds horribly messy) the piece is undoubtedly piquant, poignant and wise.
On a simple set of tarnished glass panelling, that is cleverly transformed into an open air setting in the second half during a magical Scandinavian summer night when it never quite gets dark, rivals feud, families bicker and love finally finds its way…
THE TIMES****
Sam Marlowe
A brittle, sweet meringue with a bitter centre: in Trevor Nunn’s production, Stephen Sondheim’s Bergman-inspired musical of tangled midsummer romance makes emotional agony exquisite. The latest successful transfer from the London fringe powerhouse, the Menier Chocolate Factory, Nunn’s staging is one of flawed loveliness, its imperfections swathed in misty swirls of memory and melancholy.
Hannah Waddingham as Desirée, the sensual actress at the centre of the sexual confusions, gets the balance wonderfully right. Her willowy, smooth-skinned beauty might seem at odds with the character’s anxieties about ageing. But wincing self-awareness always underlies her bright banter, and when she sings the well-worn Send in the Clowns her restrained despair is heart-rending; it’s as if only her stays and her tremulous smile are keeping her upright.
Also captivating is Maureen Lipman’s Madame Armfeldt, Desirée’s imposing mother who, gazing back over a life built on riches won from admirers in which sex was “a pleasurable means to a measurable ends”, realises that she may have missed her opportunity of real love. Lipman’s sad, searching eyes, evaluating her past and looking fearfully towards her future, and death, are unforgettable. So, too, in the end, is Nunn’s production. It’s not a rendering that never puts a foot wrong; but when it’s in step with Sondheim’s masterly music it’s sheer elegance.
