Now there are hot shows and there are hot shows. Stereophonic is a hot show. It arrives at the Duke of York’s Theatre this month groaning under all the Tony awards from its time on Broadway, and posters for it are on virtually every billboard in London and all social media - well my algorithms at any rate, currently delivering me this play and 80s football bloopers – but what the hell actually is it?
“The show is about a rock band in 1976, who have been on tour since the release of their first album, are extremely tired, and are thrown into the studio to record a second album, which is not yet written,” says Zachary Hart, who plays Reg, the bassist, “We follow the writing and the recording of that second album, and the audience is a fly on the wall, witnessing seven creative people just smashing off each other.”
And the kicker?
“We actors play all the instruments live.”
Wait. One moment. So this is Zachary Hart, an actor from the Black Country who has been working up some serious stage magic over the last few years, and is directly coming off the back of The Seagull with Cate Blanchett and Emma Corrin, and before that The Constituent with James Corden. He’s also been on TV in Slow Horses and Bodies too, but Stereophonic feels like the one to send him stratospheric. Or at least it had better, given the demands of the role.
“We don’t just play live actually,” he winces, speaking to us on a phone break from rehearsals, “We actually record live to tape too. It’s pretty nerve-wracking.”
Wait. Another moment. We must understand the set-up here. “The stage is unlike anything anyone’s ever seen,” Hart says, explaining that set looks exactly like a recording studio and that’s because it actually is a recording studio, centred around a vintage 70s mixing desk from California. When the actors play as the band – on 70s instruments, 70s amps, wearing 70s clothes (“the level of detail is unlike anything I’ve seen, the costume department did 20 different measurements on my feet to have these vintage boots made”) - they record through the mixing desk onto tape, which is then played back to the audience.
“It’s scary, and difficult because we have to act the mistakes in the script when we play, which is crazy,” he says, “But not as crazy as having to act the good one.”
Serendipitously, he’s walking past the Noel Coward Theatre and is reminded of Johnny Flynn in The Motive and the Cue, when he had to get the ‘To be or not to be…’ speech wrong, in order to be right in the script.
“It’s like that. But then we have to tape a full run-through of the song which can’t have any mistakes. We tentatively look at each other and nod, let’s go.”
Speaking before the run starts, Hart is fraught and worried and borderline panicking, with rehearsals revealing just how next-level the demands are.
He says, laughing but also really not laughing, “It became scarily apparent within the first three weeks that I was in for something big here. This is either going to be the making of me, or kill me!
“It is so heavy and demands so much. It’s so physical, so emotional, so draining. So after three weeks the thought of having to do it for six months was giving me the same physical feeling of standing too close to the edge of a cliff. I wish I was joking!”
This isn’t merely about having to act and play at the same time but is about the heaviness of the role too. Hart plays Reg, who’s the classic self-destructive rock star with added relationship issues.
“He’s the troubled one, he’s an addict, a lot of cocaine, a lot of Jack Daniels, a lot of bits of him are missing,” he says, “He has a lot going on outside of that room that he brings into the room.
He’s married to someone in the band, it’s not going well, and that’s at the forefront of that. But yeah, a lot of energy needed.”
He says the highs and the lows are huge in the play. The highs of playing and nailing the playing. But the emotional lows of the scenes are full-on too. He says he’s incrementally getting his head around the demands, “trying to get on top of my mind, my body and my soul in the same way an athlete would do. There’s just no other way of doing it. Eight shows a week for six months! It just takes everything out of us.
But to reach down into those places to make it real and authentic for audiences, I just don’t know another way of going about it than really going there.”
And here we have the crux of it and why, for all the worries Hart has, he’s also in his element. Because the challenge is massive and he seems to be the kind of actor who wants to go full into it. Not out of ego, but because it’s the right thing to do: if the set and the costume are that detailed, then the performances must follow suit.
He says he didn’t know much about Stereophonic but “I was aware of the word ‘Tony,” and when he first read the script on the Tube, he was so gripped he “travelled up and down the Victoria Line until I reached the end.”
Obsessed by how good it was he says, “I wrestled for the part and refused to let the script go until they said, ‘OK, Zack, you’ve got the part.’ And I still haven’t unclutched it. Please help!”
Hart also has a background in music, he started playing the guitar at the age of ten, instinctively realising that music was his best chance at a creative outlet in the Black Country. He was in a pretty successful group called Fans of Faye for years and did a lot of touring in his late teens and early twenties before he headed off to drama school.
Reg is a bassist not a guitarist – “so learning that is a bit like picking up your dad’s guitar, as it’s so much bigger” – but he’s not actually madly practicing to play the bass, he stresses, “I’m madly practicing to play the bass correctly as a character who is messed up. It’s not me playing, it’s him.”
And with Reg, and the entire play, what audiences are going to be connecting with beyond the spectacle of the thing, are depictions of musicians in search of moments of genius. This is something which we have seen lately in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary about The Beatles in the studio. And of course is why we’re all so interested in the great stories of bands in studios managing to emerge from their dysfunctions and drug binges, with absolute gold on records.
“I’m obsessed with it as well, like with Oasis when you hear Noel Gallagher talk about writing Don’t Look Back in Anger in ten minutes,” Hart says, “But then on the other side you hear about songs that were a real grind to make. This play is about both those things. You witness the lightnting bolt happen when someone is at rock bottom. But you also witness and hear a piece of beauty come out of the grind to get there.”
At its heart, Stereophonic gives us a real-time glimpse into this world of musicians, or more particularly, into the type of humans who become musicians.
“I watched an interview with Kurt Cobain where he was saying he was envious watching people who just liked football. He was saying I don’t think I’m more intelligent than them, I’m just too sensitive. That’s why we see into these musician’s souls because their souls are just so open.
“Reg has that. He has to lean into love and positivity just as a protection mode, because of the sensitivity. Every breath for him is too much to take. Watching these people navigate how you go about a normal day is fascinating because a lot of them find its impossible.”
Expect to be wrung out and exhilarated by Stereophonic, almost as much as wrung out and exhilarated Zachary Hart will be after six months of this. But the reality is, Hart is on a roll and before he goes back into the studio/theatre he says, “I’m one very lucky boy at the moment. I am desperate for it to continue.
Besides, he has it easy compared to others involved in the production: “Will Butler from Arcade Fire wrote all the music, and went through all this to come up with the songs. And he had to write THE song, our number one record. How the hell do you go away and write that?”
Stereophonic is at the Duke of York’s Theatre from 24th May
