One of the pleasures of A Weekend in the Country, the second most famous song in this Stephen Sondheim musical, is that of "watching little things grow". And, like a previous transfer from the Menier Chocolate Factory, La Cage aux Folles, Trevor Nunn's delicious production of this mordant classic has effortlessly expanded to fill its new space.
Nunn treats Hugh Wheeler's book, drawn from an Ingmar Bergman movie, as seriously as he does Sondheim's music and lyrics. In other words, the show is propelled by character as much as by song. Much of the plot revolves around the gradual coming together of the touring thesp, Desiree Armfeldt, and her quondam lover, Frederik, now hitched to an 18-year-old bride. The wondrously Junoesque Hannah Waddingham and the elegantly benign Alexander Hanson from their first encounter suggest the laughing complicity of genuine partners. You believe totally in their relationship; and even the show's big number, Send In The Clowns, memorably delivered by Waddingham, here seems less a cry of despair than a brief detour in their inevitable reunion.
To emphasise the drama is not to downplay the wit of Sondheim's lyrics or the ravishing beauty of his score with its echoes of Ravel and Rosenkavalier. It is also a musical that combines midsummer magic and melancholy with a sense of impending death. You see this most clearly in Maureen Lipman's exquisite portrayal of Madame Armfeldt, who starts out as the epitome of patrician hauteur, with her cut-glass vowels and worldly wisdom, and who ends as an old woman stoically accepting mortality. Under the show's celebration of sensuous delights, there is, as in all good comedy, a silvery sadness perfectly epitomised by Kelly Price's rather overlooked performance as the masochistic wife of a faithless count. Sondheim once characterised the show as "whipped cream and knives"; and both are here ideally balanced, as is the sound through the simple device of having the band placed behind the singers. The result is an evening of refined enchantment.
