Review: HERE WE ARE, National Theatre

Steven Sondheim was so revered that his colleagues anointed with the nickname “God”. Is it sacrilege to criticise him?

Here We Are remained in the drafting stage before Sondheim’s death in 2021. So perhaps it’s unfair to point a critical finger solely at him. A musical synthesis of two films by Spanish Surrealist Luis Buñuel, the first act invokes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie with the second echoing The Exterminating Angel, it’s posthumous premiere in New York was met with some lukewarm reviews in 2023. Will it make more of a splash across the pond?

A flamboyant coterie of ultra wealthy airheads hunt for a brunch spot. They are thwarted by increasingly surreal shenanigans. The aptly named ‘Café Everything’ has run out of food - prompting the waiter to commit suicide as absurd penance. Another effort takes them to an Italian restaurant only serving plastic props prompting a moment of fourth wall breaking self-consciousness.

There’s little dramatic mileage to be milked from characters who are deliberatley flimsy caricatures. Rory Kinnear, sporting a seriously questionable accent, plays Leo Brink, a tech bro Tony Soprano hybrid. His ditsy trophy wife Marianne (an excellent Jane Krakowski) is blissfully oblivious, and Paulo Szot’s Raffael – an ambassador from a fiction Mediterranean country undergoing a political uprising, is an erotically charged Latin Loverboy, the joke being that he is an erotically charged Latin Loverboy.

At its worst David Ives’ book is a single punchline Monty Python sketch dragged out into an entire musical – that punchline being that the one percenters barely possess a brain cell between them. I suppose an American audience might find their ignorance endearing. Though I can’t speak on behalf of the entire press night audience, I sense from the stony faces around me that the British counterparts just find them grating.

A more conceptually refined second act finds them trapped in an ornately decorated state room which morphs a personal purgatory, a nod to Sartre’s Huis Clos. Their extravagance has become a prison and former servant turned neo-liberal Savonarola by the name Inferno, a fantastically elastic Denis O'Hare, topples the social hierarchy wielding a snub nose pistol. The political momentum gathers some energy, but it is too reliant on easy platitudes, shaking a clenched fist at decadence and greed. There are other eat-the-rich satires that have sharper teeth and larger appetites (The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness).

There’s a more fundamental reason why Here We Are doesn’t land. The UK has its own class hierarchies, snobbery dynamics, and idiosyncrasies entrenched by a thousand years of aristocracy. In America money buys power full stop. So an imported class-based satire is surely doomed before the first note.

But it has its moments. David Zinn’s lavishly chic set and costume design explodes off the stage with feverish intensity. Sondheim’s music is a character in itself, a poltergeist mischievously trapping and toying with the coterie; its jazz infused dazzle keeps the pace tight even if the narrative can’t keep up.

Here We Are plays at The National Theatre until June 28

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