SMT 8 (2) pp.

143–157 Intellect Limited 2014

Studies in Musical Theatre

Volume 8 Number 2
© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.8.2.143_1

Graham Wolfe
National University of Singapore

Sondheim’s A Little Night

Music: Reconciling the comic
and the sublime

Abstract Keywords
This article draws on Alenka Zupančič’s and Slavoj Žižek’s recent theorizations of Stephen Sondheim
comedy to examine Stephen Sondheim’s highly successful 1973 musical A Little Alenka Zupančič
Night Music. Zupančič and Žižek argue that by ‘looking awry’ on popular modes Slavoj Žižek
like comedy we can explore how our relation to reality is still structured by fantasy sublime
and by passionate attachments to sublime objects – indeed, we can discover in Lacanian
comedy new modes of configuring the sublime. To explore A Little Night Music as psychoanalysis
a ‘reconciliation’ of comedy and sublimity is to open a consideration of Sondheim’s musical theatre
contributions towards the very debates and deadlocks that Zupančič and Žižek
identify and to suggest ways of extending their own psychoanalytic philosophy into
the realms of musical theatre, a mode that they leave largely uninvestigated. In the
process, the article aims to move beyond more traditional ‘applications’ of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, arguing that Sondheim’s musical encourages us to think differently
about Lacanian theory per se and to look in new (and comic) ways at enigmatic
terms like the ‘Real’.

Stephen Sondheim has claimed that the original concept for his 1973 A Little
Night Music (book by Hugh Wheeler) ‘was that of a fantasy-ridden musical’
(quoted in Zadan 1990: 182). The weekend in the country was to play itself out
in a series of ways for the three pairs of lovers; the elderly Madame Armfeldt,

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1. For a more detailed conceived as ‘a witch figure’, would reshuffle her pack of cards and ‘time
discussion of how
the sublime in Lacan
would revert’ (1995: viii). ‘The first time, everybody would get mixed up, and
differs from (and brings through farcical situations, would end up with the wrong partner. Then magi-
into collision) Kantian cally, the weekend would start again’ (1995: viii). Both Joanne Gordon and
sublimity and Freudian
sublimation see Žižek Paul Puccio have argued that the official version, while reverting to a narrative
(2000: 170–71) or more akin to the Ingmar Bergman film on which it is based, retains remind-
Zupančič (2003: 73–85). ers of its fantastical conception – from the spirit-like Quintet to the seemingly
magical quality of Madame Armfeldt’s dessert wine. If deprived of witches
and temporal re-orderings, its universe remains, for Gordon, ‘an ephemeral
magic fantasy, “insubstantial as a dream”’, a ‘fantastic realm where what we
will can be achieved and where lovers must be reunited’ (Gordon 1992: 152).
Although we know little more about the proposed ‘fantasy-ridden’
scenario, it appears concerned with the paradoxes of desire. The fact that,
when everything is arranged ‘right’, the male protagonist Fredrik loses his
desire for Desirée (the musical was to end with him walking off) suggests that
his desire was correlative to inaccessibility. When he gets her, he no longer
wants her, or as Jacques Lacan might put it, if you lose the obstacle, you
simultaneously risk losing the object-cause of desire (Lacan 1998: 243), which
is why it is necessary for Madame Armfeldt to keep reshuffling the deck. This
concern with desire, I suggest, is retained and intensified in the official musi-
cal. Indeed, amidst its comedy, Night Music abounds with intense anxiety
about the loss of desire when fantasies become realized. As the Quintet puts
the matter, ‘You acquiesced / And the rest is a blank’ (Sondheim and Wheeler
1995: 30). More specifically, A Little Night Music is directly concerned with
the very tricky problem of how to escape from a fantasy-ridden world with-
out simply relinquishing enchantment. Gordon’s assessment of the musical’s
conclusion should be supplemented with an inversion: far from simply rele-
gating love to a ‘fantastic realm’, implying ‘that happily-ever-after romances
can occur only in the unreal environ of operetta’ (Gordon 1992: 152), the
musical grapples with the problem of how to traverse fantasy while encoun-
tering love in the real.
This problem has much to do with another paradoxical relationship in
Sondheim – the relationship between comedy and the sublime, two terms that
are often considered as antithetical as reality and fantasy. As Alenka Zupančič
notes, a central gesture of comedy has always been the ‘act of taking a (sublime)
Thing and showing […] that this Thing is, in fact, nothing more than a poor
and altogether banal object’ (Zupančič 2003: 168), that is, ‘de-sublimating’ it,
reducing its awe-inspiring and seemingly magical appearances to base materi-
als and mechanisms.1 Musical theatre furnishes plenty of its own examples of
this comic gesture. We need only recall Dorothy and her friends’ exposure of
the ‘great and powerful’ Oz as a weak, funny-looking man behind a curtain. Or
apropos of sublime love, Madame Thénardier puts the matter succinctly when
she ushers in the most comical segment of Les Misérables: ‘I used to dream
that I would meet a prince, but God almighty, have you seen what’s happened
since?’ This perennial comic inclination to undermine sublime images and lofty
ideals, to expose and confront the banal realities that hide behind ineffable,
dazzling appearances, in addition to being a source of considerable laughter,
may also reflect one of comedy’s most valuable critical and political functions.
What better way of exposing and contesting our passionate attachments to the
fantasies that we cling to and of reconciling us to life without them? But I argue
that this vision of comedy’s relation to the sublime is productively complicated
by Sondheim’s musical worlds, in which traversing fantasy is not equivalent to

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returning to mundane reality, and in which comedy can directly coincide with 2. The phrase ‘looking
awry’ is drawn from
the highest sublimity. After all, what many consider the most sublime song in the title of Žižek’s
Sondheim is entitled ‘Send in the Clowns’. Looking Awry (1992).
In exploring A Little Night Music from these angles, I aim to suggest Žižek himself draws
the phrase from
connections between Sondheim’s work and Zupančič’s own recent theo- Shakespeare’s Richard
rizations of comedy, which attempt unabashedly to raise comedy to a high II.
philosophical dignity and reveal its vital importance amidst our contempo- 3. A recent exception
rary ‘late-capitalist’ predicaments. Crucial to this approach is her insistence is Gina Masucci
on contesting the ways in which comedy’s antagonism towards sublimity has MacKenzie’s The
Theatre of the Real:
been critically celebrated. Comedy’s inveterate inclination to undermine the Yeats, Beckett, and
ideal, the infinite, the dazzling and the everlasting can easily be linked, she Sondheim (2008).
MacKenzie’s book,
argues, with an increasingly popular ‘metaphysics of finitude’ (Zupančič 2008: while drawing
48). In contemporary times, having been cut loose from the transcendent, we extensively on
are not simply welcomed but enjoined to celebrate the limited, banal character Lacan and heralding
Sondheim’s work as
of our only-human existence – with the result, Zupančič contends, that we ‘the quintessential
are not so inclined to transform it. A central contention of her work is that example of the theatre
this humanistic doctrine of finitude – which has itself achieved the status of of the Real’ (114), says
relatively little about A
a grand narrative – is not so liberating as it may appear and its correlative Little Night Music. The
comic modes are not so efficacious for worlds that, like the official version of study also uses terms
such as the ‘Real’ in a
Night Music, have abandoned previously conspicuous fantasy-elements and broader way than the
structures only to remain, in myriad other insidious ways, deeply imbricated present article.
with fantasy. Like her Slovenian colleague Slavoj Žižek, Zupančič argues
that by ‘looking awry’ on popular modes like comedy we can discern much
about the ways in which our relation to reality is still structured by passionate
attachments and intricate orchestrations of sublime objects – indeed, we can
discover in comedy new modes of configuring the sublime.2 To explore A Little
Night Music in these lights is to open a consideration of Sondheim’s contribu-
tions towards the very debates and deadlocks that Zupančič and Žižek iden-
tify and to suggest ways of extending their own missions into the realms of
musical theatre, a mode that (while examining everything from Wagner to
Shel Silverstein) they leave largely uninvestigated.
To say that Zupančič supports her theorizations of comedy by drawing on
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory would be insufficient since a primary effect
of her analyses (at their best) is to enable Lacan’s own work to appear in
new lights or indeed to reveal its own comic dimensions. Similarly, to explore
A Little Night Music with her work in mind is not only to cast new light on
the potentials of contemporary psychoanalytic theory for a study of musical
theatre (where it has been employed rather rarely)3 but also to explore how
musical comedy itself can enable us to think differently about what psycho-
analytic thinking offers. I am interested not simply in how Lacanian psycho-
analytic theory can help us interpret aspects of a musical comedy like A Little
Night Music, but a fortiori how musical comedy can itself provoke and partici-
pate in a reconsideration of Lacanian theory. Acknowledging the notoriously
expansive scope of psychoanalytic thought (and its predilection for what crit-
ics consider impenetrable jargon), this article will seek to pinpoint revealing
connections between Sondheim and Lacan in the eminently comic twist that
both ultimately put on the sexual relationship. If Lacanian psychoanalysis is
widely known for the seemingly tragic insistence that ‘there is no sexual rela-
tionship’ – that the bliss of full unity with another human being is fundamen-
tally ‘impossible’ (Lacan 1999: 9) – Lacan’s work in the 1970s (coinciding in
fact with Night Music) confronts us with love as an impossibility that happens
(Žižek 2001b: 84). If Lacan has often been conceived as intent on radical

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‘de-sublimation’ – mercilessly revealing the mechanisms that give rise to

sublime illusions – the comic twist emerging in his later work, as both Žižek
and Zupančič note, is that true sublimity is precisely the same as de-sublimation
(Žižek 2001b: 41; Zupančič 2003: 179). I approach Sondheim as exploring and
responding to these paradoxes in the form of musical theatre at the same time
that Lacan was examining them in theory.
In a first step, to draw on Zupančič’s terms, something vital about
Sondheim’s engagement with fantasy emerges when we consider Night Music
as a comedy of ‘immanent inaccessibility’ (2003: 176). Fredrik’s first song,
‘Now’, seems to give us a husband facing externally imposed obstacles – he is
overwhelmed with frustrated desire after months of enforced celibacy in his
new marriage to an 18-year-old girl. Part of the comedy obviously consists
in the incongruity between Fredrik’s endless deliberations about how to get
her into bed and Anne’s own mundane chatter: she is talking non-stop about
everything under the sun, but all he can think of is sex. At the same time, the
comedy derives from the way that Fredrik’s obstacle is not just external. An
incurable lawyer, he applies lawyerly logic to seduction itself, codifying the
potential strategies for seducing Anne before systematically subjecting them
to further interrogation. Fredrik is his own worst enemy, his lawyerly mind
getting (comically) in the way of his attempt ‘to satisfy his needs and desires’
(Puccio 2000: 147), but what Zupančič calls ‘immanent inaccessibility’ requires
an additional step here. The song, at its outset, proposes ‘two possibilities: A,
I could ravish her, B, I could nap’ (Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 11), and for
all the energy of his deliberations, Fredrik mounts a forceful defence of taking
a nap. He determinedly applies every conceivable argument against seduction,
resorting to reasoning that any vigilant jury would dismiss as sophistry (is
seduction advisable, he asks, given the possibility of tripping on one’s trou-
sers?). ‘Now’ (the song’s first word and title) is consummate irony since what
follows amounts to an elaborate and skilful justification of deferral.
From a psychoanalytic angle we are thus fully licenced in prosecuting Fredrik
as a pervert, but not insofar as he is a middle-aged man seeking sex from an
18-year-old. His perversion consists in his complicity in what he calls ‘the ache
of my life’ (Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 35). Indeed, it is difficult to overlook
the enjoyment that Fredrik derives from these lawyer-like convolutions; the act
of legal-esque reasoning, the formal symmetry of presenting and then system-
atically dismantling propositions, becomes a source of libidinal satisfaction in
its own right (bluntly, he ‘gets off’ on his own rhetorical devices). What Lacan
calls jouissance, as both Žižek and Zupančič insist, is not simply an enjoyment
we can never fully get (and therefore indefinitely postpone, keeping the fantasy
alive) but also something we can never get rid of, something that ‘sticks’ even to
apparent renunciations or failures to find satisfaction (Žižek 2012: 381).
This dynamic finds a musical cognate in the second act’s ‘Perpetual
Anticipation’. Sung as a round, the song never ‘catches up’ with itself; at the
same moment that part of it is ‘satisfied’ (returning to the dominant), another
of its lines is only half-way through and another just beginning. This dynamic
reflects the ‘temporal difference’ correlative to desire as Lacan conceives it:

The subject is separated from the object by an interval or a gap, which

keeps moving with the subject, and makes it impossible for her ever to
catch up with the object. The object […] moves with her, yet always […]
exists, so to speak, in a different ‘time zone’.
(Zupančič 2003: 176)

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As is well known to anyone who has had this song stuck in their head,
‘Perpetual Anticipation’ literally perpetuates itself: in a short circuit of form
and content, enjoyment’s lack (that which one is forced to anticipate perpetu-
ally) converts into a strange enjoyment in the endless circulation around an
ever-denied closure.
‘Perpetual Anticipation’ thus varies a motif initiated in Act One’s ‘contra-
puntal montage’ (Swayne 2005: 31) of three temporally themed songs: Fredrik’s
‘Now’, Anne’s ‘Soon’ and Henrik’s ‘Later’. The idea, asserts Sondheim, was
to put together ‘three songs you don’t think are going to go together’; the
mismatch of their titular temporalities is reflected in their resistance to easy
alignment and harmony: ‘suddenly one note goes off and then another one
a little later, and so on’ (quoted in Swayne 2005: 251). Eventually, the lines
are made to come together, the words ‘now’, ‘soon’ and ‘later’ falling on the
same beat and harmonizing. But the almost immediate consequence of this
consummation, the byproduct of this harmonious union of all the temporal-
ities and strands in Fredrik’s life, is a pronounced shift in Fredrik’s desire.
The song ends (to Anne’s distress) with him dreamily mouthing the name of
Desirée. Desirée – desire – emerges as a requisite counterpoint to harmony,
derailing it.
As Zupančič writes, the fantasy of what is called ‘sublime love’

necessitates and generates a radical inaccessibility of the other (which

usually takes the form of eternal preliminaries or the form of an intermit-
tent relationship that enables us to reintroduce the distance that suits the
inaccessible, and thereby to ‘resublimate’ the object after each ‘use’).
(Zupančič 2003: 174)

Fredrik’s sexless relationship with Anne, an exemplary demonstration of

‘eternal preliminaries’, is supplemented by a relationship with Desirée, his old
flame, a relationship that relies for its force on intermittency. Her accessibility
(she agrees almost instantly to sex when he visits) has to be counterbalanced
by the perpetual reintroduction of ‘the distance that suits the inaccessible’.
Puccio’s comparison with A Midsummer Night’s Dream argues that ‘just as
Lysander and Hermia love one another, but are prevented from marrying by
the law of her father, Fredrik and Desirée love one another, but are prevented
from marrying because he is already married (another manifestation of the
law)’ (Puccio 2000: 136–37). But it is precisely not the law (an external obsta-
cle) that prevents them being together. After all, Fredrik is a lawyer.
This relationship’s immanent inaccessibility is foregrounded as Fredrik
re-encounters Desirée in the theatre. Her sublime status is correlative to stage
effects (‘make-up’ [Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 25]) but also to the implicit
barrier between stage world and audience. The fact that this barrier is unset-
tled (she briefly smiles across the footlights) only accentuates its relation to
sublime passion – that effervescent glint of a smile we receive from someone
onstage is the very stuff of fantasy, emanating from another realm. Fredrik
and Desirée’s relationship is dependent on retaining this status of alternate
realities for one another. The song ‘Remember’ frames their relationship as a
fantasy of what was, what might have been if not for certain obstacles, indeed
directly foregrounding the loved one’s status as fantasmatic: ‘I think you were
there’ (Ibid.: 25). Onstage, or emanating from a distant past, or shimmering in
a fantasy that ‘could have been’, the sublime object is preserved at a minimal
distance from reality, preserved as fantasy.

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Graham Wolfe

We could locate a key critical dimension of Night Music’s comedy in its

accentuation of how such ‘sublime’ love functions to efface or mute the loved
one’s human actuality. Fredrik’s ‘Now’, directly preceded by Anne’s discovery
of a pimple, rises to its sublime heights of praise in the very act of drowning
out her mundane chatter. ‘It Would Have Been Wonderful’, in which Fredrik
comically complains about Desirée’s ‘perfection’, is a similarly ironic negation
of qualities that apply to flesh-and-blood humans. ‘If she’d only been faded, /
If she’d only been fat, / If she’d only been jaded […]’ (Ibid.: 82). The necessary
extension of this logic, acknowledged by Fredrik himself, is that Desirée, as an
incarnation of the perfect woman, is ‘not quite perfection’. ‘If the woman were
perfection, / She would go away’ (Ibid.: 82–83) – which is to say, her actual
presence inhibits her functioning as a sublime fantasy.
In these respects, Fredrik would seem to have a vivid foil in the servant
Petra, who is seemingly free from sublime fantasies and able to enjoy frequent
corporeal pleasures. Yet the two, I suggest, reflect differing responses to
a similar crisis. Petra’s ‘I Shall Marry the Miller’s Son’ begins as a sombre
lament for what she believes will inevitably be lost through marriage, namely,
desire per se. ‘It’s a very short road / From the pinch and the punch / To
the paunch and the pouch and the pension. / It’s a very short road / To the
ten-thousandth lunch / and the belch and the grouch and the sigh’ (Ibid.:
101). In other words, it is a very short road from desire to banality and all-too
human corporeality divested of fantasy. ‘In the meanwhile’, however, Petra
will embrace what enjoyments she can: ‘It’s a push and a fumble / And a
tumble in the sheets / And I’ll foot the Highland Fancy’ (Ibid.: 102), she sings
to an accelerating tempo and bouncier rhythm. But what distinguishes the
song from an invigorating, gather-ye-rosebuds, carpe diem philosophy (‘Life
is process, not goal; the moment is all that can be enjoyed’ [Banfield 1993:
246]) is the profound, urgent sense of obligation attached to these enjoyments.
Petra repeatedly caps her list of transgressive delights with the insistence that
‘a girl ought to celebrate’, ‘has to celebrate’, ‘should celebrate’ what passes
by – as though enjoyment were a strange moral duty. ‘There are mouths to
be kissed’ likewise conveys obligation, the phrase having the same structure
as the one that follows it: ‘mouths to be fed’ (Sondheim and Wheeler 1995:
101). Moreover, these sections of the song, far from straightforwardly upbeat
and light, are marked by an almost breathless pace, such that the singer has
to rush and hurry herself to squeeze the phrases and the notes into the bars.
The sheer abundance of proffered pleasures – ‘many a tryst’ and ‘many a bed
/ To be sampled and seen’ (Ibid.: 102) – is correlative to a frantic, indeed quite
manic tone. In short, if the story is set at the turn of the century, the musical’s
universe reflects the more contemporary, late-capitalist dynamic theorized by
Lacan at exactly the same historical moment as Night Music’s debut. As he
argues in 1972–1973’s Seminar XX, a key shift has occurred in western society
such that enjoyment, formerly prohibited or regulated by (paternal) Law, has
become an urgent ‘imperative’ (Lacan 1999: 3). In late capitalism we are less
inclined to feel guilty for enjoying ourselves on the sly than for failing suffi-
ciently to enjoy ourselves, for not taking full advantage of all there is ‘to be
sampled and seen’ – and this transformation of enjoyment to an ‘imperative’,
as Žižek reminds us, is the best way to threaten desire and render enjoyment
difficult (2006: 304). Petra’s song is less despairing of the restraint and subju-
gation that awaits a lower-class turn-of-the-century woman than intensely
anxious about the injunction to ‘Enjoy’ that had come, for Lacan, to define the
libidinal economy of his and Sondheim’s world.

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 Sondheim’s A Little Night Music

In this light, the ‘immanent inaccessibility’ governing Fredrik’s relation-

ships reflects a strategy for orchestrating desire amidst a contemporary realm
where prohibitions and barriers to enjoyment have been eroded to a desta-
bilizing degree. Here we should complicate Madame Armfeldt’s own nostal-
gic analysis in the first Act’s ‘Liaisons’, sung just after Fredrik and Desirée
have exited to have sex. The old woman’s lament for the loss of art in sexual
affairs – ‘Where is the style? / Where is the skill?’ (Sondheim and Wheeler
1995: 40) – seems apt, given the almost grotesquely comic passage à l’acte that
we have just witnessed. To Fredrik’s enquiries about sex, Desirée had blithely
responded ‘What are old friends for?’ (Ibid.: 39) before leading him off to her
bed (with the Virgin Mary above the headboard). Juxtaposed with the illustri-
ous seductions described in Madame Armfeldt’s song, the facility of the act
occurring offstage testifies to the contemporary de-sublimation of transgres-
sive enjoyment per se: ‘What once was a rare champagne / Is now just an
amiable hock’ (Ibid.: 40). But with the preceding analysis in mind, Madame
Armfeldt’s diagnosis of the problem – i.e., that ‘Too many people muddle sex
/ With mere desire’ (Ibid.: 41) – is also highly ironic. There is nothing ‘mere’
about desire for the characters of A Little Night Music – Fredrik’s orchestra-
tion of it is as complex as Sondheim’s ‘connoisseur’s score’ (Banfield 1993:
223). Zupančič’s point, correlatively, is that ‘immanent inaccessibility’ is one
of the complex strategies that we use to engineer and orchestrate a relation to
sublime objects amidst late capitalism’s ‘crisis of sublimation’ (Zupančič 2003:
72) – in which the overaccessibility of pleasure and the reduction of Virgin
Marys to facetiously comic decorations is correlative to an ‘increasing inability
to invest our surroundings with sublime meaning’ (Ruti 2012: 155).
But perhaps Night Music suggests even higher roles for comedy than criti-
quing (however adroitly) late-capitalist libidinal economies and the dynamics
of sublime desire. Its more compelling dimension resides, I contend, in its
impulse towards a reconciliation of comedy and sublimity. For Zupančič as for
Sondheim, traversing the sublime fantasy (as abstract and inaccessible) is not
to be confused with comedy’s traditional emphasis on acceptance of the finite
and the banal. ‘The point is not that, in order for love to “work”, one has to
accept the other with all her baggage, to “stand” her banal aspect’ (Zupančič
2003: 175). Both Zupančič and Sondheim point towards a ‘funny miracle’ by
which the transcendent itself becomes accessible.
Swayne, suggesting that ‘Sondheim learned to waltz courtesy of Ravel
more than Rodgers’ (Swayne 2005: 16), asserts that the composer ‘decon-
structed the waltz in the way he deployed it in A Little Night Music’ (Swayne
2005:15). He ‘rescandaliz[ed] a previously scandalous dance through making it
the sonic sign of decoupling instead of coupling’ (Swayne 2005: 15–16). It is in
the midst of this ‘strangely surreal waltz’, ‘in which partners change partners
and recouple with others’ (Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 5), that the musical’s
main characters first appear to the audience. When the waltz returns at the
beginning of Act Two, it will be directly associated with a domain of ‘perpet-
ual twilight’, where the setting of the sun is uncannily forestalled: ‘It’s dark as
it’s going to get’ (Ibid.: 73). Is not this ‘surreal’ setting another remnant of the
musical’s original ‘fantasy-ridden’ conception? The liminal realm of twilight,
after all, is associated with fantasy creatures and undeadness. Many directors
have correlatively rendered Sondheim’s Quintet as ghostly figures, appropri-
ately reflecting the in-betweeness of the static domain they sing of, a domain
in which the main characters, as a consequence of their paradoxical relations
to desire, appear confined.

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Graham Wolfe

Swayne observes that the ascending three notes that begin the second
Act’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ ‘are a near inversion of the descending three-
note figure that permeates the “Night Waltz I” (at the words “eight o’clock”
and elsewhere throughout the song)’ (Swayne 2005: 25). My contention is
not only that these notes herald an inversion of both the waltz’s (sustained)
decoupling and of its almost preternaturally static realm of perpetual twilight.
Furthermore, it is here – in this sublime song about clowns – that Night Music’s
impulse towards the reconciliation of comedy and sublimity is most powerful.
This reconciliation, arising through peculiar short circuits between the song’s
dramatic content and musical form, will point towards ways of reconfiguring
and rendering accessible the sublime.
If comedy is traditionally associated with rebirth and renewal (as empha-
sized, for instance, in Northrop Frye’s notion of the ‘green world’ [Frye 1995:
141]), Zupančič’s analysis accentuates a kind of uncanny undeadness pertain-
ing to comic universes per se:

The comic universe is, as a rule, the universe of the indestructible […]
Regardless of all accidents and catastrophes (physical as well as psychic
or emotional) that befall comic characters, they always rise from the
chaos perfectly intact, and relentlessly go on pursuing their goals, chas-
ing their dreams, or simply being themselves. It seems that nothing can
really get to them[.]
(Zupančič 2008: 28–29)

When Fredrik and Desirée are discovered in her bedroom by the wildly
jealous Carl-Magnus (her latest lover), Fredrik remains blithely unflappa-
ble despite the fact that he is wearing the pugnacious dragoon’s own robe
and despite Carl-Magnus’s demonstrations of knife-throwing proficiency
(‘Bravo!’ [Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 44]). Comedy in such scenes derives,
à la Zupančič, from the characters’ peculiar immunity, i.e., from the fact that
even serious threats do not ‘get to them’. (‘Are you fond of duels, sir?’ – ‘I
don’t really know. I haven’t ever tried’ [Ibid.: 43].) This perpetual deflection of
any real crisis through one-liners and witty repartee – a comic tendency that
threatens, for Gordon, to sap the show of ‘inner tension’ (Gordon 1992: 153),
tipping it towards the ‘vapid realm of bedroom farce’ (Gordon 1992: 156) –
is all the more apparent in Desirée. As a consummate performer (‘old pro
that she is’ [Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 24]), she encounters no tension or
obstacle that cannot be instantly countered with charming humour or turned
into a comic bit. Her role in Fredrik’s ‘You Must Meet My Wife’ is to swiftly
parry (with rhyming ripostes) a seemingly endless succession of praises for
her youthful rival’s beauty and charm. Indeed, her first moment of eye-contact
with Fredrik – occurring as she walks onto a stage in the starring role of a
comedy – is testimony to her almost fantastically indestructible poise. Gazing
into the audience and glimpsing her former lover for the first time in fourteen
years, she ‘does a take’ (24) but skips not a beat, continuing with the scene
and losing nothing of her (comic) character.
‘Send in the Clowns’, in this light, marks a moment when the show’s
governing comic immunity cannot quite maintain itself. What Desirée is refer-
ring to in the famous song is a conventional device to cover over a moment
when something has gone wrong onstage. Midway through the second Act she
has deviated from her usual script by suggesting to Fredrik the possibility of
being together seriously and permanently, and, having been rejected, she falters

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as a show-person, finds herself bereft of the capacity to improvise and wittily 4. I have explored
this concept of the
cover. If Desirée could perform at this moment – revert to the innuendos, one- ‘object-voice’ and its
liners and blithe self-referential humour that constitutes her normal character – potential applications
all would be well. She cannot, and what follows is an exemplary manifestation for musical theatre
in other articles (see
of Sondheim’s musico-dramatic complexity, his inclination to write music that Wolfe 2012).
performs drama. That is, what needs to be covered over (by the clowns sung
about in the song) is the very intensity, ragged emotion and utter vulnerability
that comes forward through the music and singing itself, a display protracted
to six minutes, wrought with exposed silences, a shocked Fredrik sitting so
uncomfortably before Desirée while something much too real emerges in a
realm where he – and his audience – felt assured of performance.
One of the many ironies of this song, which has attracted such accom-
plished voices over time – from Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins to Kenny
Rogers to Barbara Streisand – is that Sondheim composed it around the very
limitations of a voice. Having often tailored songs to particular singers (‘you
hear the voice in your head whether you want to or not’ [quoted in MacKenzie
2008: 126]), he was asked by director Hal Prince to compose one for Glynis
Johns, who was rehearsing the role of Desirée before the musical was quite
finished: ‘I wrote it for her voice, because she couldn’t sustain notes. Wasn’t
that kind of singing voice. So I knew I had to write things in short phrases’
(‘Academy’ 2005). Correlatively, one of the song’s most unusual features in
performance is the amount of time that the singer spends not singing – with
little else to do either. The psychoanalytic irony to be added here is that it is
precisely in these silences – when the performer herself is deprived of theatri-
cal accoutrements, exposed onstage without the support of lyrics or substan-
tial action – that the song most forcefully resonates with what Lacan calls
the object-voice (Lacan 1998: 242). To fully explicate this enigmatic concept
would require more space than this article permits,4 but we can get a sense
of the paradox that it involves by noting that its exemplary manifestation is
muteness: the object-voice is ‘a voice which remains silent, i.e., which we do
not hear’ – a voice that remains painfully mute, ‘stuck in the throat’ (Žižek
2001a: 117). Mladen Dolar offers the example of the silent scream in Munch’s
painting, wherein ‘the black opening is without the voice which would mollify
it, fill it, endow it with sense, hence its resonance is all the greater’ (Dolar
2006: 69). Traumatically exposed before Fredrik, Desirée experiences agony of
a different quality than in Munch, but the pain of her exposure likewise reso-
nates in pronounced vocal voids, in the song’s framing of something in her
that cannot come forward, ‘stuck in the throat’.
In the theatre it is hard to overlook an irony in the juxtaposition of what
Desirée does articulate (she sings about theatrical breakdown) with the sublim-
ity of the number as performed onstage, so far from a theatrical debacle. But I
suggest that something does go irreparably awry at this point in Sondheim’s
show. In key senses, this song – which was written late in the process and ‘under
protest’ by Sondheim at Prince’s insistence (quoted in Gordon 1992: 148) – is
all wrong. It does not belong here, in the comically irritating, crude, ‘thoroughly
Wildean’ (Banfield 1993: 221), ‘faintly ridiculous’ (Gordon 1992: 147) world of
these characters. Is there not, in this ‘wandering, liquid’ Rachmaninoff-inspired
‘rhapsody’ (Sondheim quoted in Swayne 2005: 24), something too much, too
profound, too ‘rich’ for that world? On a psychological level, there is simply no
sign, before this moment, that Desirée has the capacity, depth or cause for an
emotional response of this magnitude and quality. Her decision to lure Fredrik
towards marriage had seemed a predominantly practical scheme, a ‘backup

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Graham Wolfe

plan’ of sorts. ‘It was only a thought’, she says (98), and I would suggest that
until this point it was only a thought.
If the song is out of place in the world of the show, it performs, in its very
sublimity and emotional magnitude, a vital structural function. Amidst all this
singing about ‘losing her timing’, Desirée unknowingly gets it very right for
the audience – her timing is perfect. No, many of us do not ‘love farce’, at
least not for three hours, and by this point in the show we have probably
had enough of the character’s ‘usual flair’ (99). Indeed, without this song and
what emerges through it (something ‘in her more than herself’, to use the
Lacanian phrase [1998: 263]), we might not even care that Desirée ends up
with Fredrik at the play’s close. But to take a further step, perhaps the song’s
out-of-placeness is also what is most psychologically realistic in it. In ‘real
life’, it may often occur that a calm, practically oriented person ventures into
conversation just to see whether a romantic impulse is perhaps reciprocated,
only to find himself or herself, in putting the matter into words, overwhelmed
with utterly unexpected emotion. I did not know I was desperately in love until
I pronounced certain phrases; the feeling did not properly precede its articula-
tion. As Bertrand Russell put the matter in a letter to Lady Ottoline, ‘I did not
know I loved you till I heard myself telling you so – for one instant I thought
“Good God, what have I said?” and then I knew it was the truth’ (quoted in
Žižek 2012: 569). Real-life conversations about relationships are often defined
by such radical shifts in register and tone.
This dynamic enables us to look from an irregular angle at that most
puzzling of Lacanian terms, the Real. What is the Real if it is not simply equiv-
alent, as most interpreters of Lacan agree, either to ‘reality’ or to ‘authenticity’?
Given the expansiveness of this term’s applications in critical theory, we would
be wise to keep our discussion focused on its relevance to the sexual relation-
ship, which, in Lacan’s (infamous) assessment, is ‘impossible’ (Lacan 1999: 9),
‘nonexistent’ (Lacan 1999: 45). Lacan is not denying that empirically existing
people can and do engage in successful sex; the statement implies instead
that romantic love as a thrust towards sublime unity – an absolute overcom-
ing of the divisions between two separate people, effecting their union in a
perfect oneness – is afflicted with a fundamental antagonism. Even the most
compatible lovers can never fully and totally coincide, as Desirée lamentingly
grasps: ‘Me here at last on the ground, you in midair’ (Sondheim and Wheeler
1995: 98). What she glimpses, furthermore, in her famous recognition of the
tragic asymmetry of her and Fredrik’s desire – ‘I thought that you’d want
what I want – Sorry, my dear’ (Ibid.: 99) – is for Lacan reflective of an inher-
ent disjunction: ‘the other sees something in me and wants something from
me, but I cannot give him what I do not possess – or, as Lacan puts it, there
is no relationship between what the loved one possesses and what the loving
one lacks’ (Žižek 2005: 104). The Real, in this context, is often understood
as correlative to that inherent impossibility: ‘The Real here is the impossible,
the impossibility of sexual relationship’ (Žižek 1999: 295). From this angle, far
from the stuff of comedy, the Real would seem to point towards something
eminently tragic in the Lacanian diagnosis of our human condition, defined
as it is by inaccessibility. If, as Gordon asserts, Night Music confronts audi-
ences with the fact that ideal romance ‘can occur only in the unreal environ
of operetta’ (Gordon 1992: 152), then our best option (à la Zupančič’s ‘meta-
physics of finitude’) would seem to be to reconcile ourselves, with a smile or
a laugh, to the Real of impossibility, light heartedly accustoming ourselves to
a necessary separation from the very transcendence that we so ironically have

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 Sondheim’s A Little Night Music

the capacity to conceive. Zupančič’s intervention here – an intervention that

accentuates the potential comedy of the Real – is not to suggest that there could
in fact be a (symmetrical) sexual relationship but rather to assert the necessity
of reconceiving the notion of impossibility as such:

T]he whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impos-
sible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or
funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible.
It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it
happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It always happens at the wrong
time and in the wrong place; it is always something that does not fit the
(established or anticipated) picture. The Real as impossible means that
there is no right time or place for it, not that it cannot possibly happen.
(Zupančič 2003: 176–77, original emphasis)

Is there not a fundamentally comic dynamic at work in such a shift? In

Zupančič’s words,

Comedy or, more precisely, comic sequence is always inaugurated by

some unexpected surplus-realization. This surplus-realization may well
be produced by failure, by a mistake, an error, through misunderstand-
ing (and it usually is), but the moment it occurs it changes the very
structure of the field.
(Zupančič 2008: 132)

Desirée seems to be enquiring about a possible convenient arrangement –

a stable, adult-like relationship to end the ‘muddle’ (98). But what she gets
(‘produced by failure, by a mistake, an error’) is a surplus realization that
‘changes the very structure of the field’ and indeed the aesthetic of the show.
Zupančič continues:

Not only, do we (or the comic characters) not get what we asked for, on
top of it (and not instead of it) we get something we haven’t even asked
for at all. And we have to cope with this surprising surplus, respond to it
(this is the imperative of the genre). It is this discrepancy of something
en plus that leads the way and drives the comedy.
(2008: 132, original emphasis)

Not only does Desirée not get the convenient marriage to Fredrik that she had
enquired about; on top of it she gets something she has not even asked for –
passionate love for Fredrik. Both she and he are left ‘to cope with this surpris-
ing surplus, respond to it’. In this light, if the song is a lament for something
lost – a lost chance, something Desirée feels she has missed out on and will
eternally lack – what it stages is also the emergence of a surplus, something
that neither of the characters was expecting to find here.
To be clear, none of this is to imply that Desirée’s ‘Send in the Clowns’
is, or should be, funny in the theatre. At stake at this moment is the mini-
mal difference that separates it from comedy – a self-difference operative in
Zupančič’s own phrasing of the Real: ‘traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or
funny’ (Zupančič 2003: 176, original emphasis). Indeed, we might suggest that
the pathos of the scene arises not simply because of a tragic loss, but because
neither Desirée nor Fredrik is able (yet) to recognize the comic potential of this

153
Graham Wolfe

5. The term surplus. Does not this minimal difference apply, a fortiori, to the song’s form
‘anamorphosis’ is
drawn from Chapter
itself? To coin a phrase, the pathos of Desirée’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ resides
7 of Lacan’s Four in the fact that neither character on the stage yet recognizes it as an inherently
Fundamental Concepts anamorphic song, one that can, with the slightest shift, be sung as a joyous,
(1998).
revitalizing duet.5 The song’s comedy, we could say, consists in its capacity
6. Zupančič and Žižek, for this shift. But of course, in order for this shift to happen, Fredrik needs to
drawing on Hegel, use
the term ‘concrete start singing.
universality’ to capture What is Fredrik’s own relation to the Real as ‘impossible’ at this juncture
this kind of dynamic in the show? Apropos of Fredrik’s object of desire, Sondheim’s fundamental
(see Zupančič 2008:
11–40). gesture in ‘Send in the Clowns’ consists of a kind of switching-places of the
sublime. Sublime perfection (in the abstract) comes across itself in the guise
of its opposite, as the very (concrete) undermining of sublime perfection.6
Desirée is guilty, in the moment of this song, of so many of those behaviours
explicitly cast by Fredrik, previously, as the antithesis of ‘perfection’: ‘If she’d
only looked flustered / Or admitted the worst, / If she only had blustered / Or
simpered or cursed […] If she’d started to flinch, / If she’d cried or whatever
[…]’ (Sondheim and Wheeler 1995: 83) – Desirée does all of these all-too
human things in ‘Send in the Clowns’. However, this de-sublimation is not,
in Sondheim, equivalent to a simple descending to mundane reality – how
could it be, since the song in which it occurs is so elevated, so conspicuously
transcendent to the characters’ previous world? The sublime, we could say,
does not dissolve but rather switches sides: we shift from a sublime fantasy
(necessarily maintained by Fredrik at a distance from reality) to the sublime
moment when abstract fantasies cannot hold their comportment, when some-
thing utterly unexpected breaks through the characters’ established modes
of performing themselves (their ‘usual flair’) and rattles the static world that
their fantasies have buttressed.
This ‘something’ is, for Fredrik, initially traumatic, disturbing, shattering.
This unexpected display of pure, unconcealed love for him is shocking, an
intrusion of something outside the fantasy frame of the very genre he has
been inhabiting – a disturbing excess that does not belong in the world of his
show. Here again, the dramatic content of the scene is redoubled in the music:
we might suggest that Fredrik leaves the stage partway through this number
because he simply does not belong in this kind of song, because, given the
kind of musical-theatre character he has proven to be, he is utterly out of
place in such a number. But it is for this very reason that the world to which
he returns appears suddenly so empty to him. This emptiness is not simply a
result of Anne’s abandoning him for Henrik or of recognizing that Charlotte’s
attraction to him was no more than a ploy to make her husband jealous. The
real catalyst is the song itself, after which – and in comparison with which –
the previously established aesthetic of Fredrik’s world appears so vacuous.
Just as the show itself, after ‘Send in the Clowns’, can never return to the
aesthetic, the tone and the pace that dominated preceding scenes, so Fredrik
cannot go back to his customary comic mode. Desirée has literally stolen the
show, and there is no way now of getting that unexpected show-stopper out
of his head. The only way to go on is to ‘respond to it’, and in musical theatre,
the best way to respond to a surplus is to sing along.
To suggest that Fredrik undergoes what Lacan calls a traversal of the
fantasy (Lacan 1998: 273) is thus by no means equivalent to the common-
place that true love consists in accepting the loved one as she ‘really is’, in her
mundane actuality. To transpose Zupančič’s dynamics into the form of musical
theatre, we could say that what drives love, as opposed to desire, is precisely

154
 Sondheim’s A Little Night Music

the split registered in ‘Send in the Clowns’, that is, in the eminently paradoxi-
cal way it combines all-too human imperfection, failure and misstep, with
transcendent force and rhapsodic profundity. To love ‘always means to find
oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that sweats, snores, farts, and has
strange habits. But it also means to continue to see in this object the “some-
thing more”’ (Zupančič 2003: 174). Ultimately the beloved is neither the banal
nor the sublime object, but rather ‘what results from a successful (or “lucky”)
montage of the two. In other words, what we are in love with is the Other as
this minimal difference of the same that itself takes the form of an object’ (Zupančič
2003: 175, original emphasis). Put differently, it is not that Fredrik will now
love Desirée as a ‘mere’ finite human being divested of sublimity, nor that the
sublimity of the song somehow abolishes her banal dimensions. It is rather
that his awareness of her as an inevitably finite, banal, limited human being
(capable of slipping up on the stage, saying the wrong lines, losing her timing)
is short-circuited with the sublimity of this song. Zupančič’s suggestion that
these two dimensions can be paradoxically ‘attached to each other’, entering
a kind of ‘parallel montage’ (Zupančič 2003: 175), is nowhere more apparent
than in the complex interrelationships that musical theatre can give rise to.
To speak of ‘Send in the Clowns’ as an ‘anamorphic’ song is thus to
distinguish its dynamics from more common discourses on love. The point is
not that what was once a song about lack and disjunction has now become
the site of union, with two voices harmoniously integrated as one, eradi-
cating lack. If, as Puccio notes, the narrative’s ‘final recoupling’ is ‘musi-
cally indicated by Fredrik and Desirée singing together for the first time in
the play’ (Puccio 2000: 142), Sondheim expressly accentuates the asymmetry
that persists in this recoupling: Desirée is still on the ground while Fredrik is
still in mid-air; she is a ‘merry-go-round’ while he is ‘King Lear’ (Sondheim
and Wheeler 1995: 110). The conspicuous ‘gaps’ that marked the initial solo
version (the vocal ‘voids’ between sung phrases) are not filled in by the addi-
tion of Fredrik’s voice (as though the ‘empty spaces’ in Desirée have been
eradicated by union with Fredrik or vice versa). Nor, however, does the song’s
anamorphosis reside in putting a ‘positive’, uplifting slant on the limitations
and obstacles previously lamented. Such is the stance of what Zupančič calls
our contemporary ‘metaphysics of finitude’, wherein we are enjoined to look
in a more ‘optimistic’ way on the fact of our limitations, deciding to sing about
them instead of lamenting them. Rather, what is looked upon awry in this
reprise is the very relationship between love and comedy. To fall in love is to
slip up onstage, to lose our timing and drop our lines – and to make of this
theatrical debacle a sublime duet.
‘Finally’, writes Zupančič, ‘the miracle of love consists in “falling” (and
in continuing to stumble) because of the Real which emerges from the gap
introduced by this “parallel montage” […] that is to say, because of the real
that emerges from the non-coincidence of the same’ (Zupančič 2003: 175).
If the lovers’ eventual identification of themselves as ‘clowns’, and Madame
Armfeldt’s identification of them as the ‘fools’, is the culmination, as Banfield
suggests, of the show’s repeated ‘references to stock comedy’ (Banfield 1993:
216), the lovers’ reprise of ‘Send in the Clowns’ simultaneously inverts the
bathetic dynamics with which that kind of comedy is traditionally associated.
The movement is not simply from the lofty to the mundane (i.e., the grand,
accomplished Lawyer and the eminent Actress suddenly realize their silliness).
To sing this song together is to enter a new mode of comedy in which they
will continue to stumble, to misstep, to ‘inadvertently trip’ (Sondheim and

155
Graham Wolfe

7. For a more detailed Wheeler 1995: 43) and fall into each other’s bathtubs – in a most sublime way.
discussion of this usage
of ‘reconciliation’ and
In other words, the reprise of ‘Send in the Clowns’ not only marks the success
its associations with of love but sets forward a new definition of love for the characters themselves.
Hegelian thought, see This love consists of making a sustained duet of an experience of derailment,
Žižek:
of having one’s usual show thrown irreparably off-kilter. In Sondheim, this
This is how derailment is itself the biggest number in the show. For all their talk of desir-
Hegelian
‘reconciliation’ ing ‘coherent existence’ (Ibid.: 111), Fredrik and Desirée, proclaiming them-
works: not as selves clowns, will make into their song a number correlative to a Real that
an immediate unexpectedly intervenes, a moment when customary performances fall apart,
synthesis or
reconciliation of when previous shows come crashing down, and when sublimity is discovered
opposites, but as where it is least expected. It is in this sense that to truly traverse a ‘fantasy-
the redoubling
of the gap or
ridden’ universe is to reconcile the comic with the sublime.7
antagonism – the This analysis, in exploring Sondheim’s A Little Night Music through the lens
two opposed of Zupančič’s and Žižek’s psychoanalytic philosophy, has aimed to show how a
moments are
‘reconciled’ when popular work of musical theatre can, not despite but through its comedy, reveal
the gap that the complexities of human desire and fantasy, and love’s paradoxical relations
separates them is to the sublime. It aligns itself with Zupančič’s contention that comedy can do
posited as inherent
to one of the terms. very ‘philosophical’ things, like radically contesting and complicating dominant
(2006: 106) discourses on love, and it extends this contention through a consideration of
qualities peculiar to musical theatre. Specifically, Night Music compels us to
complicate presumed alternatives between love as a consuming passion ‘that
fuses the two lovers in one’ and love as a rationally ‘de-sublimated’ arrange-
ment – ‘the ideal (prevailing today) of two autonomous and independent egos
constructing a “meaningful” relationship, based on mutual recognition, respect,
and exchange’ (Zupančič 2008: 135). But if comedy can enable us to look awry
on love, the inverse is also true. To explore the structural affinities between love
and comedy is to look in new ways at the operations of comedy itself and its
potentials for intervening in our persistently fantasy-ridden worlds. I suggest
not simply that musical theatre can enable us to glimpse the sublime in an era
increasingly bereft of it, but that musicals can bring forward the intricate and
complex ways in which our realities are still orchestrated in relation to sublime
fantasies and passionate attachments. What A Little Night Music demonstrates,
above all, is that the most powerfully comic way of intervening in human fanta-
sies is not to dissolve the sublime but to reconfigure it.

References
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Dolar, M. (2006), A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge: MIT Press.
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MacKenzie, G. (2008), The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim,
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Suggested citation
Wolfe, G. (2014), ‘Sondheim’s A Little Night Music: Reconciling the comic and
the sublime’, Studies in Musical Theatre 8: 2, pp. 143–157, doi: 10.1386/
smt.8.2.143_1

Contributor details
Graham Wolfe is an assistant professor of Theatre Studies at the National
University of Singapore. His articles have appeared in journals such as Mosaic,
Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of the Fantastic
in the Arts, Theatre Research in Canada and The International Journal of Žižek
Studies.

Graham Wolfe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

157
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PRESS | Performance Studies

JOHN MCGRATH
Plays for England
by John McGrath, introduced by Nadine Holdsworth

ISBN: 9780859897181
Also available as an eBook
2005 | 352pp
£14.99, $21.50 PB | £9.99, $16.50 eBook

This is an edition of nine of McGrath’s plays for the English 7:84 Theatre
Company. It covers McGrath’s work for the company spanning four decades,
from the 1960s through to the 1990s
The book has a substantial contextualising introduction and commentary on
the plays by Nadine Holdsworth, one of the leading specialists in the work
of John McGrath. This is set alongside supporting documents such as pro-
gramme notes, reviews and letters.
The plays and theatre work of John McGrath are studied in many theatre
departments but they have not been available to the reader. This collection
should make them available to students, audiences and the public at large
with an interest in theatre and in the social issues of their periods.
The late John McGrath made his name as a playwright and television writer
and director, founding the 7:84 Theatre Companies. He was Visiting Fellow
in Theatre at Cambridge University and Visiting Professor in Media Studies
at Royal Holloway College. Nadine Holdsworth is Head of Theatre Studies
Department at Warwick University. www.exeterpress.co.uk