Directing <i>Follies</i> at the National Theatre

I have always loved Stephen Sondheim's work, but before Follies, I had never directed a musical by him or anyone else. I had staged a few operas, but my background was in new plays at the Royal Court and Shakespeare at the RSC. So, when Rufus Norris, the Director of the National Theatre, asked me to take it on, I was equal parts daunted and exhilarated. When I flew to New York to meet Steve, his instructions were simple. Firstly, the transformation into Loveland must be bold and unexpected, like the change from black and white to colour in The Wizard of Oz. Secondly, the casting of the show demanded great actors for the four main roles but ‘personalities’ in the supporting roles. In the end, I was lucky enough to have great actors across the board but I understood what he was getting at; the secondary characters needed to read immediately to an audience; they weren't given sufficient stage time to allow for a more gradual character development. We needed performers with a strong, defined presence. He also described the show as ‘a very flawed piece’. My response to that was, ‘name a piece of drama that isn't’. The history of the Broadway musical is all about ‘fixing’. If, during previews or the legendary Out Of Town Tryout, something in a show isn't landing, it is rewritten, restaged or cut and gradually improved. Successive productions of any classic musical tell that story—numbers are removed, reinstated or reorchestrated and changes made to the book. When a show sits confidently within its genre, this approach can be effective, and there are many examples of it yielding huge and lasting success. However, more fragile, tonally nuanced pieces can suffer when they are cleaned up in this way. When such a show's contradictions are ironed out, its meaning becomes less clear. The British stage tradition can suit such work better because it is rooted in a respect for text. One of the nation's founding fathers is William Shakespeare. A playwright is at the centre of our national identity. This contributes to the unique respect our theatrical culture gives to the writer. The first British production of Follies was at the West End's Shaftesbury Theatre in 1987 and was, strangely, the apotheosis of the Broadway ‘fixing’ tradition. Produced by Cameron Mackintosh (and playfully mocked by Sondheim as Hello, Follies!), it was a total rethink of the original show. Four new numbers were put in, and the book was radically re-written to give the show a happy ending. This production had many great moments, but, in my opinion, it was at odds with the dark heart of Sondheim and Goldman's vision. This was a show about four people on the verge of nervous breakdowns. A clean, neat form could never truly serve such material. Maybe we could celebrate the show's jagged edges rather than try to tidy them up. We could view them as a deliberate choice rather than a flaw. This thinking led me to the decision to use James Goldman's original 1970 book. But I needed a central idea for the production that would hold the show's unique mosaic form together and make a virtue of its contradictions. In the end, after a lot of thought, I reached the conclusion that show was about the psychological necessity of integrating past and present versions of oneself. The majority of the characters gathering for their reunion party have found a way to do this, but Sally, Phyllis and their respective husbands Buddy and Ben had not. They were each at war with their pasts. When they come back to Weissman's theatre, they are confronted by memories of who they once were, and their personal crises deepen. The timing and location of our production helped us. Contemporary audiences, especially in a not-for-profit theatre, are comfortable and familiar with fractured form, multiple time schemes and the idea that dark and light can coexist in theatre. In 1971, the show was ahead of public taste, especially within the conservative context of Broadway. Although most of Sondheim's shows premiered on the Great White Way, he was not a conventional Broadway composer. His work has always been a hybrid of populist musical theatre tradition, which he understood on a cellular level, with a more searching European art house, avant garde aesthetic. A London audience now would embrace these elements equally. Once I started working in detail on the show, my biggest discovery was Sondheim's mastery of form. The closest experience I'd had like this was directing Shakespeare, where one's starting point is the language. In a Shakespeare play, the meaning of a scene is encoded in whether it's written in verse, prose or both, where the verse-line ends, where it rhymes, how regular it is and so on. In this way, form reveals content. In the early Follies rehearsals, I worked with Nick Skilbeck, our musical director and the actors, looking at how the lyric and music were related; where they sat naturally together, where they seemed at odds with one another, where patterns were set up and where broken. Some of the songs in the show, ‘Broadway Baby’, ‘I'm Still Here’ and ‘Losing My Mind’, had become standards. Over the years, through numerous iterations, they had deviated from what Sondheim originally wrote. Audiences had become accustomed to hearing the aural equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy. With a forensic examination of what was actually written, we began to uncover the dramatic truth of each musical moment and how the form, genre and temperature of the song revealed the character's motivation and psychological state. One interesting example was ‘In Buddy's Eyes’, where Sally is lying about her married life in order to seduce her old flame, Ben. Musically, the song plays the lie as if it's true—almost saccharine in its romanticism—but as it develops, it's as if Sally starts believing her own fiction and becomes emotionally vulnerable. The form of the music shows us Sally's inner world and how readily she can believe her own fantasies. Similarly, in ‘I Could Leave You’, when Phyllis lists Ben's multiple failings, the elegance of the waltz form counterpoints with the caustic lyrics in a way that reveals both Phyllis's brittle restraint, and the way it contains a deep inner rage. In working on these songs, I started to learn that if we attended to the specificity of Sondheim's formal choices, the truth of each moment could be revealed. Steve was there on the first preview. After the show, we were in the backstage lift on the way to the bar when he said ‘that's the first time I've believed the characters’. Needless to say, I was hugely flattered, but in the end, he was, I think, commenting on how a British writer-centred theatre culture had benefitted this piece. Our production treated Follies as a piece of drama, which uses music as its form rather than a musical. I trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where the principle of trusting the text was drilled into me. This commitment continued into my time running the Royal Court, where the living writer is at the centre of every production. I simply applied these principles to Follies. With a writer as masterly as Sondheim, the more the writer's choices are investigated and, above all, trusted, the more it can come to life. Dominic Cooke CBE is a British director and writer. He trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and then worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Cooke has won a total of five Olivier Awards, including ‘Best Musical Revival’ for his acclaimed production of Sondheim's Follies at London's National Theatre in 2018.