The American creator of The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown, recently told The Times that the impression of him in New York was that he was “just a loathsome, arrogant, miserable prick”. Well, I’ve now seen this marital musical as well as his earlier Parade, whose surprising subject was the lynching of a Jewish man in the South some 90 years ago, and I can assure him that some of us take a more charitable view. He’s clearly not the sunniest bloke, but he’s an immensely gifted composer and a decent lyricist — and as open as Sondheim to dark and difficult themes.

Not that The Last Five Years is another Company. But then that’s as masterly a portrait of fragmenting and fractured relationships as ever emerged from the rehearsal room. In any case, Brown’s new musical is a two-hander, focusing on the initial ups and eventual downs of the brief marriage of Jamie, who is Jewish and an aspiring novelist, and Cathy, the “shiksa goddess” who is trying to succeed as an actress.

However, the show has a problem, which is that the story lacks oddity, unpredictability, surprise. Brown’s Ayckbourn-style trick, which is that time moves in opposite directions for the two characters, disguises rather than solves this problem. Lara Pulver’s Cathy begins by bemoaning Jamie’s secrecy and selfishness while he sings that he’s been breathlessly waiting for a woman just like her and doesn’t care about anything else, whether it’s his mother’s broken heart or the history of Jewish suffering.

Damian Humbley’s Jamie ends up trudging out of their marriage, leaving only an empty chair behind, while Cathy’s eyes sparkle as she too rapturously declares that she’s been waiting for him.

The causes of their conflict are common enough among the high-flying or high-expecting classes these days: his accomplishment and her jealousy. Jamie’s first novel gets a rave review from John Updike in The New Yorker, and soon he’s off to literary parties and book readings, where he’s much ogled by the women and, it seems, succumbs to some of their charms. But Cathy’s fate is to be offered the odd summer tour and, in one of the livelier sequences, to have to sing and smile through one of those mass cattle auctions that call themselves auditions. The performers are strong, especially Pulver, who can turn a high note into a shout of joy or a screech of pain. Brown’s score varies from the lush to the troubled, with percussion and piano nervily criss-crossing the octaves and doing much to distract us from the plot’s predictability. But the next Sondheim? That remains to be seen.

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