I've just seen the two best hours of theatre this year

I've just seen two of the best hours of theatre of the year. Does it matter that they were preceded by another hour of theatre that took its own sweet time?
For a while I was worried that no show could handle the weight of expectations that Stereophonic brings with it from Broadway: a New York Times review dubbing it 'a must-see American classic' and the most Tony nominations so far for a nonmusical. Let alone one as self-styled and slow-boiled as David Adjmi's fly-on-the-wall, three-hour play about a Fleetwood Mac-like Anglo-American band taking a year, from 1976 to 1977, to make their soft-rock masterpiece in a Californian recording studio.
I can forgive a stodgy opening more than a fudged ending, though. Judge Ibsen by only his first scenes — often as not, a pair of servants filling each other in on who the other characters are — and you would never get his greatness. If I'd left the final Sondheim musical Here We Are (at the National until June 28) at the interval, before its wonky but wonderful second act, I'd be convinced it was a glib takedown of Manhattan manners. The first hour-plus of the new Mission: Impossible film is largely people spouting grave exposition to each other indoors — but the last hour has a cool bit in a submarine, and a way-cool bit with biplanes, so all is forgiven.
The gurulike Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie insists his payoff only works because of all that no-action set-up. I'm not convinced, but I do wonder, looking back at Stereophonic, how much the extraordinary emotional detonations of its final half owe something to its rambling introduction. Slowly but surely we get to know this fictional band's fractious, talented pair of couples and their peace-making drummer. We see them coerce, clash, kiss, yack on, and now and then make beautiful music together.
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Part of you wants to go in to remix the thing — trim bits here, add more ambiguity there. But then, as you imagine yourself in the same wood-panelled control room as the two hairy engineers listening in, these meltdowns and epiphanies start to feel thrillingly intimate.
One late scene has heinous insults being thrown one second, heavenly harmonies being sung the next. It's a neat gag and a sharp insight into the paradoxes of making things.
It's the band's search for perfection that is the making and breaking of them. Six days on a drum sound. A song you see the guitarist Peter take from good to great as he rearranges it while the band plays it. Amid a strong cast, Jack Riddiford as Peter wields his American accent, instrument and undiplomatic insights with utter authority.
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The director David Aukin makes it all plausible and propulsive. The designer David Zinn makes that studio so real you feel you could lean forward and operate the faders yourself. Could they have got to the great stuff an easier way? Sure, in a perfect world. Yet Adjmi has an angle on perfection — that it's less important than something that's alive, that makes you feel — just as he has an angle on relationships and creativity, and the mix of the heartfelt and the considered that both need.
Stereophonic doesn't rush. Yet it's so absorbing, affecting and amusing I'd see it again in a heartbeat. ★★★★☆Duke of York's Theatre, London
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