Originally published on L.S. Media. 24th July 2012.
Stephen Fletcher and Helen Carter in The Last Five Years. Photograph by Gavin Trafford.
L.S. Media Rating ****
Cast: Helen Carter, Stephen Fletcher, Nick Phillips.
The course of true love never did run smooth, even less so when told over the period of five years and from two different perspectives and times. This is the premise of Jason Robert Brown’s enormously well written musical The Last Five Years.
From start to finish or even from finish to start, depending on you gave the more sympathy to during the show, struggling actor Catherine Hiatt and Jamie Wiillerstein, a novelist on his way up the social literary ladder, show their feeling and desires from across the gulf of their time together from first flush of romance, through to their marriage and finally the moment where the inevitable sadly happens.
The two-hander is brilliantly captured by the two actors on stage, every minute emotion you can glean from a relationship that starts off with high hopes and goes through its ups and downs is not something that is easy to portray, especially in the confines of the intimate but closeted space of The Actors Studio. In Helen Carter and Stephen Fletcher and aided by Nick Philips on piano, these two Liverpool actors poured everything, every fibre and sinew into showing how a relationship that is skewed and ultimately and distressingly doomed really ever had one person’s view after all.
Whilst the excellent and stunning Ms. Carter as Cathy showed and sang the story of the young Jewish writer and aspiring actress’s life from the end, Stephen Fletcher gave his usual top rated performance as the man with so much hope but who, perhaps with some naivety allows his work to get in the way of someone else’s ambition. Tellingly the only time the two physically interact with each other is on the day of the wedding; for one brief spell binding moment their lives are in synch, as they say I do. It isn’t long before the pair drifted apart again, physically, emotionally and tragically in opposite directions in remembering what happened.
Tremendous!
The Last Five Years is only on until August 3rd, it’s a musical unlike any other, made by the actors on stage who give new meaning to being in love.
Ian D. Hall