“I’m having the best time of my life right now,” says Lucy Karczewski, smiling broadly. Sitting on the sofa beside her, Jack Riddiford agrees. “I feel so lucky.”
The two actors are playing Diana and Peter, one of the couples at the centre of David Adjimi’s Stereophonic. This three-hour play, about an Anglo-American band who go into a recording studio for six weeks to make a second album and emerge a year later with a mega-hit – but with their lives irrevocably transformed – was a sensation when it arrived on Broadway last year.
With songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, the play – which itself had been a decade in the making – was nominated for a record-breaking 13 Tonys and won five. There’s sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, and a whole parade of late ’70s fashion, but the power of Stereophonic springs from the way it blends music and dialogue, to create a funny, warm and devastating portrait of people under pressure….