How to compose a smash-hit

A bit becomes a hit in a play free of the clichés of creativity

Stereophonic
DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE, LONDON

Creativity is notoriously hard to dramatise. Even the best bio-dramas struggle to avoid the scene in which Wordsworth’s quill strikes through dahlias and triumphantly substitutes daffodils; or when Beethoven scrunches up and chucks away reams of staved manuscript paper until his fingers suddenly strum duh-duh-duh-der on the table and the soundtrack strikes up the Fifth.

Stereophonic, by the Syrian-American writer David Adjmi, thrillingly avoids these clichés by daring to show the slowness and repetition of artistic craft. The four acts of the almost three-hour play take place across a year from June 1976 as a rock band works on its latest album – first in a studio in Sausalito, California, and then, seeking fresh perspectives, in an LA soundhouse. The fact that, in David Zinn’s design, the stage remains unchanged despite the move is one of several quiet jokes about the rituals and superstitions of artists.

The band is unnamed but its mix of US and UK talent and the inclusion of two couples recalls the 1970s zenith of Fleetwood Mac’s problematic balancing of talent and ambition between private pairs John and Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Bio-drama has become a prevalent dramatic form – led by James Graham with plays such as Frost/Nixon and Dear England – but straight depiction can lead to legal/tactful omissions or inclusions. (Irrelevant dialogue such as “despite that, you’re a great guy” sometimes seeming calculated to forestall injunctions.)

Because Adjmi’s characters are fictional, the interactions between druggy bassist Reg (Zachary Hart) and floaty vocalist Holly (Nia Towle), or authoritarian lead guitarist Peter (Jack Riddiford) and smart singer-songwriter Diana (Lucy Karczewski), can channel Fleetwood Mac legends – especially around tensions that arose from the young women’s gathering facility with composition and instruments – without being sued by Mac survivors or booed by super fans and also give the playwright space to invent.

Stubborn drummer Simon (Chris Stack) completes the band and sound engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) keep the pitch perfect while less successful with the levelling of egos. Gelb, Butler and Stack have transferred from Broadway, alongside four new West End band members. These sliding personnel fittingly reflects another reality of rock – although in this case the new outfit feels seamless, with Karczewski, a recent Lamda graduate, suggesting future superstardom. The guys teem with the denim, beards, sideburns, tresses and spliffs of the era.

Adjmi (born 1973) also extends the experiments of another younger frontline American dramatist, Annie Baker (born 1981), in the use of theatrical space and speech. While there can be issues over “restricted view” seats or inaudible performers, plays are conventionally directed so that the audience can see and hear everything.

However, Baker’s The Flick (2014), set in a cinema, subverted this convention by allowing characters to enter a projection booth at the rear of the stage, in which their conversations were unheard and often only partially visible. Through coincidence or homage, Adjmi reflects this set-up with the soundproofed music room of a recording studio upstage and the control booth nearer us, while adding a further point-of-view nuance that sound between performance and production areas can either be muted or activated, with the characters not always knowing when mics are live.

Most remarkably of all, Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin show across multiple takes of the same songs – original compositions by Will Butler of Arcade Fire – how a bit becomes a hit. And in every theatrical element, it’s exactly the same with Stereophonic itself.