The Stage

The Last 5 Years

Published Monday 14 February 2011 at 09:46 by Mark Shenton

Jason Robert Brown’s painfully intimate and infinitely bleak song cycle The Last 5 Years, charting the doomed five-year relationship of a budding novelist and actress, is a miniature musical masterpiece, but is always fiendishly difficult to pull off. It sets up a deliberate tension to pull in two directions at once, as we observe the couple from opposite viewpoints - she tells their story from the end of the relationship to its beginning, while he simultaneously tells it going forwards. Only briefly in the middle do they collide.

Lauren Samuel and Christopher Pym in The Last 5 Years at the Tabard Theatre Photo: Claire Bilyard/scarabpictures.webs.com

But Drew Baker’s riveting, focused new production knits it together superbly, thanks to several thrilling contributions. Ben Rogers’ clever design frames them in mirrored apartments, with a desk cut in the middle between them and a bed at each end beside a reflective surface on which they can each see distorted views of themselves. This may be an ironic comment on the fact they appear to see themselves through their own selfish eyes.

Meanwhile Brown’s soaringly melodic, pertinent and poignant score is given rich musical depth by a six-strong band of piano and strings, led by Lee Freeman. But while that is all the support any performer could hope for, they are otherwise out there alone. Save for that mid-show collision, there is no interaction, just a parade of searching, soulful songs that are interior monologues.

And here both Lauren Samuels - who placed third in the BBC’s Dorothy contest - and newcomer Christopher Pym each work wonders to create and utterly inhabit their characters. One of the themes of the show is how life is full of unequal success, and that feeling is amplified here by seeing Samuels appearing in this tiny west London fringe theatre at the same time as The Wizard of Oz is about to open at the London Palladium. But the show that she is in is an unqualified success.