There is a perennial fascination with the nature of creativity – what ignites it, what sustains it, and what, too often, destroys it. In this, creativity might be viewed as analogous to life itself, the consequence of a complex array of often unpredictable connections and influences, its ultimate viability always uncertain. That any individual cell of an idea develops into a fully fledged work of art, let alone one that survives across the centuries, is no less than miraculous.

Literary analysis of these creative forces has focused increasingly on the rise and inevitable fall of rock stars, perhaps an unsurprising development given the ubiquity of rock music over the decades in which many contemporary writers were developing their craft. In novels, Roddy Doyle (The Commitments, 1987), Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999), Jennifer Egan (A Visit From The Goon Squad, 2010), and David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue, 2020) are among those who have taken rock music as their subject. Biopics aside, film has given us Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984), Damien Chazell’s Whiplash (2014), and Danny Boyle’s Yesterday (2019), while plays on the same theme include Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll (2006), Simon Stephens’s Birdland (2014), and, most recently, David Adjmi’s Stereophonic.

Almost Chekhovian in both its structure and tone, Stereophonic centres on an unnamed rock band as it records its second album. An irresistible portrait of how the same conflicting egos, obsessive aspirations, and sexual entanglements that fuel musical genius can also smother it, what makes Stereophonic remarkable are its songs, written for the play by ex-Arcade Fire instrumentalist Will Butler and judiciously peppered throughout the first half the play. Having these songs played live on stage by the cast brings a vitality and intensity to Stereophonic that, on its own, Adjmi’s script can’t entirely capture.

The cast of Stereophonic (photograph by Julieta Cervantes)

Originally produced at New York’s Playwrights Horizons Theatre in 2023, Stereophonic transferred to Broadway in 2024, garnering a record thirteen Tony Award nominations and eventually winning awards for best direction (Daniel Aukin), best featured actor (Will Brill), and best new play. Ironically, the play’s success came just as Adjmi – despite receiving widespread recognition for his early plays, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship – contemplated stepping back from playwriting, citing the near-overwhelming financial barriers writers faced when trying to have their work produced. In such a climate, writing a ‘last’ play about a rock band being thrown millions of dollars and unlimited time to record an album must have seemed, for Adjmi, quite the creative indulgence.

Set in 1976, in a recording studio in the San Francisco enclave of Sausalito – the studio’s brown and orange tones, its wood panelling, perfectly capturing the ambience of the 1970s (design by David Zinn) – Stereophonic begins as sound engineer Grover (Eli Gelb) and his assistant Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) are testing sound levels. One by one, the band members arrive. Drummer Simon (Chris Stock) has been away from his home in England – and his wife and children – for three years (he was meant to be away for six months). There is friction in the relationship between bassist Reg (Will Brill) and keyboard player Holly (Juliana Canfield), while the other couple in the band – vocalist Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka) – flaunt their sexual and creative affinity. Grover and Charlie – comic foils to the burgeoning crises within the band – endeavour to hold the sessions together, reaching for a level of competence and confidence they don’t initially possess (Grover has lied to the band on his CV).

As the recordings progress, the band learns that, many months after its release, their first album is beginning to garner critical attention, while one of its singles (written by Diana) is slowly creeping up the charts. Unsure of her own talent, Diana is buoyed by the single’s success. Growing in confidence, she begins to assert her own creative needs. The record company, similarly animated by the attention the first album is now receiving, pours even more money into their already generous budget, allowing the band to spin out their planned six weeks in the studio into a series of recording sessions spanning almost a year.

Anyone with even a vague knowledge of rock music will recognise the parallels between Adjmi’s band and Fleetwood Mac, whose 1977 album Rumours is universally cited as one of the greatest LPs of all time, spending more than 550 weeks on the US Billboard charts since its release. Fleetwood Mac’s implosion post-Rumours is the stuff of legend, and despite Adjmi’s insistence that the characters in Stereophonic are drawn entirely from his imagination, the potency of the play largely depends on the awareness audiences bring to the theatre of not only Fleetwood Mac’s story, but also the many similar implosions that mark rock history.

Adjmi demonstrates the mutual disintegration of the band’s personal and professional relationships, fraying edges that devolve into an inexorable unravelling. Simon’s wife, no longer prepared to wait for him, wants a divorce, and he despairs that he is losing his children. Reg cannot get through a session without being stoked by either alcohol or cocaine. Holly, tired of wiping up Reg’s vomit, wants to end their relationship and move out of the band’s share-house. Diana yearns to do more than just shake a tambourine and wave her arms in the air. She wants her songs included on the album in their entirety, and refuses to budge when the band decides that cuts should be made. When Peter – a brittle hypochondriac and de facto leader of the band – proposes to Diana that they have a baby (a metaphor perhaps for the fate of their creative partnership), Diana refuses. She has already put her own ambitions on the backburner to support Peter’s nascent musical career and won’t do it again, particularly given it’s her songs that have, in large part, given the band its current impetus.

In Peter, Adjmi offers a compelling portrait of leadership and its pitfalls. At first, the band is happy to defer to Peter’s acute instincts (he can tell in a moment the shift that’s needed to lift a song from ordinary to extraordinary). This is a motley crew that needs a strong and decisive figure to bring some unanimity to their project. However, Peter is unable to balance the human needs of the group, their flaws and frailties, with its artistic agenda. The more he exerts his authority and the more autocratic he becomes, the more the others rebel, a rebellion, ironically, that only hastens their foundering.

Despite the conflicting needs that undermine the band’s harmony (an excruciating scene in the final act when the band attempts, again and again, to find some musical consonance underlines this point), what is notable about Stereophonic is how muted the drama is. In this, the play stands in stark contrast to the melodramatic, even histrionic Prime series Daisy Jones and the Six (2023, based on Taylor Jenkin Reid’s 2019 novel), another loose re-imagining of the Fleetwood Mac story. In Stereophonic, the relatively subdued nature of the band’s resistance to its looming collapse is, in part, what gives the play its Chekhovian echoes. So too the way Adjmi weaves through the script the comic pathos of characters who are struggling to understand their purpose, their place. Stereophonic is, at times, simultaneously very funny and painfully poignant. For example, a long spiel from Reg – about the history of Sausalito and the infamous ‘war’ between those living in the expensive houses on the hills of Sausalito and those living in the houseboats on its harbour – prompts exuberant laughter but it cannot completely hide the essentially broken and bleeding man Reg is.

What Stereophonic fails to emulate is Chekhov’s ability to reveal the deepest reaches of the human soul. Despite the best efforts of the cast – a flawless ensemble performance – the characters’ occasional and rather self-conscious monologues are not enough to offer any genuine insight into their innermost selves. This is exacerbated by Adjmi’s failure to encapsulate within the writing either the passion and drive that sparked the band’s genesis or the creative heat of the band’s sexual couplings.

Fundamentally, what the play lacks is any material manifestation of the first act of the band’s story. It is hard to lament the band’s demise, to feel the full extent of its tragedy, when we know so little of the forces, the creative urgency, that drove its coalescence. This is where Butler’s songs come into their own, hinting at the genius of the band, the preternatural sum of its parts, and, crucially, what is on the verge of being lost.

It may be overreading Stereophonic to discern within it any political layers, but stepping out of the theatre onto the streets of New York, into the fraught political milieu that is the United States, it is impossible not to think about the play’s themes – unity and union, autocracy and disintegration – without considering that milieu. How long, the play implicitly asks, can any such union maintain its integrity while still answering the needs and urges, benign or otherwise, of the individuals who comprise it? In Stereophonic, we witness a band not so much raging against the dying of the light, but one resigning itself to its inevitability. Despite the huff and puff of the American political class, one wonders whether most Americans aren’t doing the same.

Stereophonic continues at the John Golden Theatre. Performance attended: 10 July 2024.