There is opera by Bellini, Handel and Mozart to come, but this year’s Buxton international festival opened with the premiere of a musical. The Land of Might-Have-Been weaves the romantic 1930s melodies of Ivor Novello into the pacifist autobiographical writing of Vera Brittain, who grew up in Buxton. At first sight it’s not an obvious pairing, though Novello and Brittain were exact contemporaries. Yet it works surprisingly well.
Novello composed the patriotic anthem Keep the Home Fires Burning in 1914, but the world’s troubles cast no discernible shadow over the hit musicals he wrote in the 1930s and 40s. One of the many achievements of Michael Williams in knitting Novello’s sentimental songs so tightly into a narrative drawn from Brittain’s morally charged memoir Testament of Youth is that the music and the words enhance one another so effectively. On their own, each would be an interesting curiosity. Together, they draw things out from each other, conjuring an effective piece of musical theatre.
