Sorry-Grateful

Sorry Grateful Audio

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Wanting closeness and being able to do closeness are different skills.

That's the thought I carried out of the theatre after seeing Company, and it's been sitting with me since. The invitation came from a friend whose daughter was playing Joanne in the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama production, and I was delighted to go. Let me deal with the theatre part first, because this piece is going somewhere else and I don't want the somewhere else mistaken for a review. The energy and talent on stage were palpable. Next stop the West End for the whole company of them, and I mean that literally: I enjoyed this student production more than I enjoyed the 2018 West End staging. More on that comparison later, because it turns out to matter.

What follows, then, is contemplation rather than critique. I love this show, I'm a lifelong Sondheim fan, and seeing it again made me want to hold a 1970 musical up against everything I've since come to understand, through the lens I now work with, about avoidant men and about couples where one or both partners have lost connection with themselves and with each other.

If you don't know it: Company arrived in 1970, with music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, and it changed what a musical could be. It began life as a set of short plays Furth had written about couples. Hal Prince, the genius that he is, read them, saw a musical in them, and went on to direct the original production. The show kept that shape. There's no plot to speak of. A man named Bobby turns 35, and across a series of scenes we watch him visit five married couples, all friends of his, all of them wanting him to settle down the way they have. He's the perpetual bachelor. Charming, a little detached, the man everyone loves and nobody quite reaches. In recent years some productions have turned Bobby into Bobbie, a woman, a device switch I don't really support, but more on that later too. The couples bicker and adore each other, often in the same sentence. Nothing resolves the way you expect. The show circles the question of whether Bobby will ever let anyone in, and ends on a song called "Being Alive," where he finally asks for connection instead of watching it from the edge of the room.

The score is some of the sharpest writing Sondheim ever did, and he wrote a lot of sharp things. "The Little Things You Do Together" compresses a whole marriage into a joke: the shared concerts, the mutual irritation, the way affection and friction turn out to be the same material. He saw something true about long partnership that most love stories miss. The annoyance and the closeness are the weather of the same house. And "Being Alive" still undoes me every time. Bobby starts by listing intimacy as a set of intrusions, someone crowding you, needing you, knowing you too well, and by the end he's asking for exactly those things anyway. That turn, from defended aloneness to wanting to be known, is one of the great emotional arcs in the form.

Which brings me back to where I started. The show gives you Bobby wanting connection. It never shows him learning how to be inside one.

bell hooks, in The Will to Change, writes about the particular way men are trained into isolation, taught that self-sufficiency is strength and needing people is weakness, and how the cost of that armour is a life spent watching intimacy rather than living in it. Bobby is that man, drawn with real tenderness. But hooks doesn't stop at wanting. The work she describes is relearning how to be present, how to be known, how to stay. Terry Real, who does this in the therapy room, makes the same distinction I opened with: the wanting and the doing are separate skills, and men are often starved of the second one. Bobby gets to the wanting. The show ends there, as if the wanting were the destination. It's the doorway.

Be precise about which man we're talking about, though, because there are two, and Sondheim stages both. There's the man who avoids closeness because it frightens him. That's Bobby. But look past him at the five husbands and you find the other one: the man already inside a marriage who wants the closeness and has no skills for it. Harry is the clearest case. Ask him if he's ever sorry he got married and you get "Sorry-Grateful," the most honest thing any man says all night, both things true at once, the wanting and the ache. But notice who he says it to. He gives it to Bobby, sideways, man to man. He never takes it to Sarah. All five husbands are like this. They can be truthful about their marriages to anyone except the person they're married to. Sondheim puts the unskilled man on stage five times over and never asks him to try. His fumbling is the scenery. Bobby's wanting is the drama. Nobody's doing is ever the plot.

And this is where the 1970 of it shows. The couples talk past each other the whole show, and that's Furth's scenes as much as Sondheim's songs. They perform, they deflect, they sing over one another's heads. Nobody says a straight, true thing to the person they're married to. The women especially orbit Bobby's indecision rather than existing as people with their own weather. The show can imagine a man being lonely inside his freedom. It can't imagine a relationship where two people stay themselves and stay close, where difference is something other than a punchline or a compromise. Its only options are merge or run. There's no third thing.

Which brings me to the switch I flagged earlier. Bobby becoming Bobbie.

Here's my bias, declared. The 2018 West End production made that change, with Bobbie as the 35-year-old woman fielding everyone's questions about when she'll settle down, and I didn't think it worked. So when the lights came up at Central on Bobby, the man Sondheim actually wrote, I felt relieved. Something had been returned to its rightful shape, and I suspect that's part of why this production reached me the way the 2018 one didn't.

I've tried to work out why, because plenty of people loved that London version, and the reversal is a serious choice rather than a gimmick. It does something real. It also loses something, and the loss is what I kept snagging on.

What it loses is the specificity. The Bobby Sondheim wrote is a very particular figure: the man who avoids. The one whose charm keeps people at arm's length, whose freedom doubles as a hiding place, whose whole problem is the exact thing hooks and Real spend their careers naming. Make Bobby a woman and you soften the diagnosis, because the avoidant charming bachelor and the avoidant charming bachelorette carry different cultural weight. The original lands as a portrait of a specific male wound. That's part of what makes it ring true. It's about the person least likely to do this work being asked to do it.

What the reversal gains is that it frees the story from being a referendum on one man's readiness to marry. A woman turning 35 while everyone asks when she'll settle down walks into a different set of pressures, and the ambivalence reads differently. His question is whether he'll grow up. Hers is whether the institution fits her at all. That's a genuinely interesting show. It might even be a truer one for now. But it answers a different question than the one Sondheim was asking, and for me the swap thinned out the thing I go to Company for.

So is it authentic? The male Bobby is the more precise instrument for the thing Company is secretly about, which is a man's difficulty with intimacy. Bobbie is the more resonant instrument for the thing Company is on the surface about, which is anyone's ambivalence toward marriage. You pick your authenticity depending on which layer you're staging. The 2018 production chose the surface, did it well, and I still came away missing the wound underneath.

None of this counts against the show. A lesser piece of writing wouldn't hold this much weight. Company is good enough that you can bring bell hooks and Terry Real to it fifty years later and it doesn't crumble. It shows you where its century ended and ours began. Sondheim gave us the man at the door, wanting in. He learned to want. The doing is the half of the story still waiting to be written, and it's the half most of us are living. A stage full of drama students in 2026 made that door feel newly open. The walking through it, is ours to do.