The latest fringe musical to vault nimbly into the West End is this stirring folkie adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s short story about a man who lives his life in reverse.
At heart a two-man venture from Jethro Compton (book, lyrics, direction, design) and Darren Clark (music and lyrics, orchestration and arrangement) it relocates the story from Jazz Age Baltimore to 20th century Cornwall but retains the message that every second of life should be lived and savoured. Forget the 2008 Brad Pitt film: this is the version to treasure.
The atmosphere is like a ceilidh – or the West Country equivalent – during a pub lock-in. On a set of ropes and timbers, a 13-strong cast of joyfully versatile actor-musicians give vent to moving, witty songs that swell like the ocean. Feet are stamped and tubs are enthusiastically thumped.
The script has been tweaked and the production recast since I saw and loved it at Southwark Playhouse last July: the sketched-in supporting characters feel more winsome and cartoonish, and the cast’s artfully dishevelled clothes and smeared faces make them look like extras from Oliver! but it remains a sweet love story that carries a powerful, almost mystical musing on the nature of existence. Plus you’ve got to love a show that rhymes “cup and saucer” with “divorce her”.
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This time round John Dagleish winningly plays Benjamin, whose birth in 1918 as a 70-year-old man complete with three-piece suit, bowler hat, pipe and walking stick prompts his mother to kill herself.
His father keeps him sequestered at home, assuming he will wither and die, but Benjamin grows younger and in his 50s ventures out to the local pub, determined to “live a little life” as one rousing number succinctly puts it. Here, he meets barmaid Elowen, “the only woman [he] will ever love”.
Their romance is thwarted by shyness, family disapproval and happenstance, but the Second World War brings them together, they go through parenting and loss and are finally parted on the night Neil Armstrong walks on the moon in 1969. Benjamin – spoiler alert – regresses through boyhood and babyhood and winks out of existence in 1988.
The book smartly juxtaposes the smallness and localness of the story with epic international (and extra-planetary) events. The love story of Benjamin and Elowen (played with understated conviction by Dagleish and Clare Foster) is couched as a meeting of the moon and the sea, subject to massive fluctuations of time and tide.
The gap between events is ticked off in precise units, to illustrate both the enormity of time and how a few seconds can make the difference between life and death.
This is no overnight success: Compton and Clark first conceived it in 2019. But the transfer of such an oddball, charming hit 16 months after its success at Southwark does suggest a new nimbleness and openness in the West End, especially towards new musicals that don’t originate from the same old big names.
Ambassadors Theatre, to February 15: buy tickets here
