It's Sondheim, but not as we know him

Sondheim’s final musical, inspired by Surrealism, has a ‘mesmerising oddity’ unlike any other, but is nonetheless compelling, and a Chekhov-inspired play is as riveting as an Ibsen-based one is lacking in depth

- Michael Billington

WHERE do musicals start? In modern America, they are often kicked off by memories of the movies: one has only to think of Legally Blonde, Mean Girls and Clueless. It says a lot about the late, great composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim that his final work, Here We Are, was inspired by the films of the Spanish Surrealist Luis Buñuel. The result, with a book by David Ives, is now having its British premiere at the National's Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1, and it is strange, quirky, captivating and unlike any other musical I've ever seen.

It derives from not one, but two distinct Buñuel movies: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). Mr Ives has knitted them together so that in the first half we see a group of the fashionable American rich, joined eventually by a couple of soldiers and a bishop, travelling from one restaurant to another in search of ever more unavailable food. By the second half, these weary travellers have arrived at an old-world foreign embassy from which, after initially being wined and dined, they are inexplicably unable to escape.