Expectations have been almost stratospherically high for director Marianne Elliott’s West End revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company (1970), due both to pre-publicity and opinions on social media of preview performances. I don’t think I have seen a less-than-glowing word about it. Nor am I about to utter the first.

Elliott and her producer Chris Harper’s idea to turn protagonist Bobby into Bobbie pays off beautifully... beautifully enough to have persuaded the notoriously finicky Sondheim into not only giving his permission but collaborating on retooling his songs and Furth’s script for a female protagonist. Bobby in 1970, a successful but commitment-phobic man examining his own character and relationships on his 35^th birthday, was one of the first indicators that the stage musical could engage in conceptual musings rather than narrative, as well as an incarnation of the young adults of the 1950s and ’60s growing up and becoming gradually more self-aware. “Adults”, in those days, meant male adults; half a century on, many women now find themselves all too grindingly familiar with the same issues.

This is not the pseudo-feminist cliché about “having it all”, but rather, about having one particular part of it, a meaningful and lasting relationship, in a world whose social and professional pressures and increasing atomisation all militate against it. Bobbie enjoys time with her couples of friends (the show had the working title Threes), but they are keen to see her happily paired off while she cannot see that the “happily” bit constitutes an integral part of the package. (Samuel Beckett also wrote a work entitled Company, whose conclusions about the existence and identity of the individual are broadly similar.)

As so often, Sondheim’s achievement is to convey such complex contemplation in songs which, whether poignant or breezy, give the illusion of being much more straightforward than their content in fact is. You listen... but then you think about what you’ve just heard. In this production, the show-stopping numbers are Act One’s “Getting Married Today”, in which friend Paul’s bride-to-be Amy is now, wonderfully, his groom Jamie (Jonathan Bailey delivering high-speed patter with verve), and Act Two’s “The Ladies Who Lunch”, in which Patti LuPone as Bobbie’s eldest friend Joanne shows how consummately she can sell an emotional progression in song.

At the centre of it all is Rosalie Craig’s masterly Bobbie. Or rather, not always at the centre. Elliott’s interpretation of the piece is that it probably takes place in Bobbie’s imagination, and much of the show physically separates her from other characters by using trucked-on rooms and closets which (usually) the others inhabit while Craig watches or comments from outside. The first scene, where she appears to be hiding from a surprise birthday party(!), looks as if it might be set in a police interrogation room.

Elliott has reimagined this musical for a new age and an application that is more universal than ever; I wouldn’t be surprised, nor at all disappointed, if it turns out to be difficult in future to revert to its old male-centred version.

Written for the Financial Times.