Damian Humbley & Lara Pulver in The Last Five Years

A great score remains tethered to an unsatisfying musical in the case of The Last Five Years, the Jason Robert Brown song cycle of sorts now in its British premiere at the ever-enterprising Menier Chocolate Factory. Less revelatory than such previous Menier imports as tick, tick ... Boom! and Sunday In the Park With George, actor-turned-director Matthew White's production does sufficient but never moving justice to a piece that by its very nature defies empathy. As was clear from its brief if musically acclaimed 2002 off-Broadway run, this two-hander has at its problematic core a male character who's an irredeemable jerk, and no amount of thespian legerdemain can disguise a bitter flavour to a show that simply won't be sweetened. Or rouse an audience to care much one way or the other.

The show's unusual temporal conceit may actually land better in Britain than in the U.S., not least because the likes of Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard have habituated local audiences to playing with chronology as Brown does here. (Indeed, Stoppard's Artist Descending A Staircase flirts to a point with the structure employed by this musical.) While we hear in conventionally linear fashion of budding novelist Jamie's rise and rise as a lauded author who, still in his 20s, is getting rave reviews from the likes of John Updike in The New Yorker, the woeful tale of his actress/wife, Cathy, is told in reverse, from the plaintive agonies of show opener, "Still Hurting," through to a final optimism we know won't last. White's staging brings the two players together more frequently than Daisy Prince did off-Broadway, the sliding walls of David Farley's set marked out with musical notation from the first song and words culled from the passages of the career-making novel that Jamie reads midway through; a bed, meanwhile, is the defining prop, at one point doubling as the rowboat from which Jamie shows to out-of-towner Cathy the New York landmarks that help clinch their romance.

Damian Humbley & Lara Pulver in The Last Five Years

Brown's musical contribution rightly won him two Drama Desk Awards on the occasion of the New York premiere, and it's all but impossible not to be impressed by a songwriting smorgasbord that can encompass honky-tonk, jazz, Broadway-style uptempo numbers, and mournful lamentations. But with almost five years having now passed between that New York run and now, one hopes with time that Brown may acquire the distance that would allow him to refocus a show that, any protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, remains deeply one-sided: it's Jamie's story, warts and all, with Cathy barely seen as anything more than an accessory and almost never in the round.

The paradox, then, is that Lara Pulver's Cathy sweeps the production before her, even if (a minor cavil) she's not the blonde one might expect from a "shiksa goddess" of the song of the same name. Barely audible (presumably intentionally) in that hurtful opening song, she herself opens up to land that and every number that follows, even if the audition sequence later on still feels tired and dated: a post-Chorus Line dramatic sequence that deserves rethinking (and is saved on this occasion by Pulver's appealingly saucer-eyed take on life, in all its absurdity, amorousness, or heartache). Damian Humbley, late of The Woman in White on the West End, sings well, but he's a fairly stiff presence and looks ill-at-ease with some of the knockabout physical stuff that came effortlessly to New York originator Norbert Leo Butz. It scarcely matters that Humbley seems uncomfortable spouting words like tsuris ; more to the point is the difficulty anyone might have inviting a connection to (on this evidence) a serial philanderer who tells the supposed love of his life, "I will not lose because you can't win." Those are strong words, indeed.

Indeed, on second viewing, the real issue posed by this show pertains less to the human capacity for crippling erotic grief and more to questions of Cathy's judgment: if we can so quickly clock the essential solipsism of this show's motor, why didn't Cathy, who, after all, does in a rage let hurl to Jamie the words, "you and you and nothing but you." That's the problem: The Last Five Years is about him and him and nothing but him. (In all their time together, didn't these two talk about anything else?) Cathy clearly doesn't recognise the truth of her own words: perhaps this aspiring actress would have made a better critic.

The Last Five Years
Written and composed by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Matthew White
Menier Chocolate Factory