Aberdeen Arts Centre Four stars Birthdays couldn’t come more bittersweet for Robert, the swinging bachelor at the centre of Stephen Sondheim and lyricist George Furth’s Me-Generation dissection of the life and loves of the terminally single male. At the grand old age of 35, Robert is the last man standing among a set of couples, managing to court three different women in-between playing gooseberry at a string of dinner dates where the artifice of domestic bliss is exposed in various ways. Mid-life crisis gives way to peppy epiphany, as Robert realises that just because he got hurt doesn’t mean he can’t still have a ball. Revived here in appealingly boutique fashion by Aberdeen’s s Castlegate Arts in association with David Adkins, and born of the new freedoms afforded by the 1960s collective loosening of belts, Sondheim and Furth’s series of navel-gazing vignettes more resembles a Neil LaBute compendium than standard Broadway fare. As the couples orbit around Oliver Savile’s
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.