“But is tomorrow yesterday? Or has it been and gone today? I wish someone would say.”

George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play Merrily We Roll Along is the near forgotten precursor to Sondheim’s later musical of that title. It has the same reverse chronological structural conceit. But no songs. Despite fantastic reviews it was a box office failure. But the narrative mode it if not created then certainly adopted on a large public stage of the first time had, ironically enough, plenty of implications for the future.

Selling a story told this way to an audience, even a discerning audience, is not easy. Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along (1981) has been periodically revived and to much acclaim, but it was a failure when originally staged. It may even owe its own existence to the success, amongst a much more limited audience, of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play The Betrayal (which fictionalises the author’s extramarital affair with the presenter Joan Bakewell but in reverse order) as the earlier play of the same title on which it’s ostensibly based.