This quietly thrilling Broadway hit about a warring, Fleetwood Mac-style group is a long player – but it rocks
Everyone wants to know the band, see the band, sleep with the band, but are you sure you want to be the band? That’s the question David Adjmi asks in his quietly thrilling play about the bitter truth behind much great art: that it is torture to make. Before the acclaim and the stadium shows come the hours trapped inside your own head and the studio, which, in mid-1970s California, is where we find the band in question, sniping, snorting lines and self-imploding over the rattle of a snare drum.
The group in the glass booth, raised like a stage within a stage above the mixing desk, are Fleetwood Mac in all but name and No 1s: two warring couples – one British, one American – plus a paternalistic, waistcoat-wearing drummer and a difficult second album to write (the music, an original score by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, has a more-than familiar sound). Indeed, Stereophonic is so faithful and compelling a portrait of a band breakdown that, when it debuted on Broadway last year, it attracted not only a record number of Tony nominations but also a lawsuit, since settled, from Rumours producer Ken Caillat, who claimed such authenticity was achieved by “uncannily” copying his own memoir.
So, yes, we are those lucky flies on the wall, buzzing as we’re bounced between rivalry and camaraderie, the petty and profound. Who knows what time it is outside the airless, windowless room? Inside there is a perpetual end-of-the-night mood: weary yet wired. What the band need is sleep, but all they have is cocaine. “Can we get him a coffee?” asks Diana when bass-playing Londoner Reg (Zachary Hart) staggers in, hobbled by a hangover, only to find the machine is broken. “Then can we get him a bag?” Hart is desperate and desperately funny as the wacked-out wreck you’d hate to meet dropping his t’s on a night out, watched witheringly by the long-suffering Holly (a fierce, formidable Nia Towle). Sixteen-hour days in the studio over the course of a year? Talk about feeling trapped in an unhappy marriage.
Perfect disharmony: Diana (Lucy Karczewski), Holly (Nia Towle) and Peter (Jack Riddiford)
We eavesdrop on the musicians, responding to their cues and their changing rhythms, dialogue overlapping like the layering of instruments
Chris Stack’s mannered Simon mediates while tyrannical, tortured genius Peter (Jack Riddiford) all but breaks Diana, played by Lucy Karczewski in a performance as raw as her alto voice. Her songs, thinks Peter, are too long and need cutting, a criticism that could also be levelled at Adjmi’s play. Running at more than three hours, Stereophonic both teaches a lesson about artistic compromise and ignores it. The effect, as the group grinds on, is that we’re in the trenches with them, frustrated, impatient, seduced by the occasional burst of elation and song.
Two gossiping sound engineers provide commentary and comic relief. Like them, we eavesdrop on the musicians, responding to their cues and their changing rhythms, dialogue overlapping like the layering of instruments. The play’s pace is often languid; it isn’t afraid of a heavily pregnant pause. In fact, there’s plenty of silence – for a show about making music, there’s surprisingly little of it –though the actors perform Butler’s toe-tappers and a showstopper ballad with skill and effortless elan.
And Stereophonic really is cool (so stylish with its back-on-trend bell-bottoms and Soho Home soft furnishings!), for all that it is, in other ways, an intriguingly unfashionable play: no politics, no multimedia, no triumphant ending. Just a five-piece band learning that the highs are hard won and they’re fleeting.
Stereophonic runs at Duke of York’s theatre, London WC2 until 11 October
Photographs by Marc Brenner
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.