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This low-key musical about a symbolic journey by foot has a lot going for it. It’s adapted by Rachel Joyce from her best-selling, Booker-nominated 2012 novel. It has two of the most innately, warmly likeable lead actors in Mark Addy and Jenna Russell as the questing Harold and his exasperated wife Maureen.
Director Katy Rudd conjures episodes from our hero’s journey along the length of England with simple props, a beautiful backdrop of looming skies and the collusion of an agile ensemble and a puppet dog. The folk-inflected score by Passenger is witty and tuneful. Yet for all its obvious charms and consummate professionalism it remains curiously uninvolving and slight. Call it a meh-sical.
Originally a radio play and later a film with Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, Joyce’s story is simple. Harold Fry, a retired brewery rep in Devon, receives a letter from a female former colleague, Queenie, telling him she is dying of cancer in a Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice.
He pens a bland reply and, because it’s a nice day, walks to the postbox. Then to the next. Then towards the town’s main post office. When a girl in a garage tells him that self-belief can work miracles, he impulsively decides to keep walking, dispatching postcards to Queenie en route, exhorting her to stay alive until he reaches her.
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Harold’s is a non-religious pilgrimage, simultaneously contemporary and old-fashioned. He’s excavating personal guilt rather than finding faith. It’s a fictional example of the growth-through walking genre that embraces Robert McFarlane (The Old Ways), Cheryl Strayed (Wild) and Raynor Winn’s now-discredited The Salt Path. Yet Harold and Maureen, with their quaint names and their tamped-down, routine lives, feel like they could exist at any point in the last century.
The exigencies of plot require Harold to be ill-prepared and symbolically shriven of the comforts of modernity: his journey is accomplished without suitable shoes, much shelter or his mobile phone, so he can communicate only by post or from phone boxes. His romantic peregrination goes viral in local newspapers then on social media, to the point where he becomes almost a cult leader.
Something about this perambulating everyman inspires people to confide in or join him: a silver-haired gentleman who’s deeply in love with the young man he pays for submissive role play; a widowed farmer’s wife; a born-again druggie; a mansplaining outdoorsman.
Joyce worked jointly on the stage adaptation, which won admiring reviews when it first opened at Chichester, with the inventive Rudd and choreographer Peter Darling (though the show’s lively dance routines are credited to Tom Jackson Greaves). But her starkly evocative, no-nonsense prose and the way she slowly reveals information aspects of the book necessarily lost in translation to the stage.
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Instead we have the fiddle-and-harp led score by Passenger, aka Mike Rosenberg. The opening number, Rise Up, is sung to a heedless Harold by a leaf-garlanded sprite known as the Balladeer (Noah Mullins). This figure, who will gain significance in another guise, alternately exhorts and harangues Harold and brings to the story’s depiction of landscape an unearned folkloric dimension.
The act one closer, The Pilgrim’s Tale, is a pandemonium of whirling jacks-in-the-green and macabre hobby horses. It’s emblematic of the way Rudd and Darling create visually arresting scenarios from nothing – but why?
There’s a sweet song, The Art of Getting Lost, where missed loved ones including Harold’s son are magicked up from items of washing. The silver-haired gent gets a Broadway-style tap routine and the comic song Out of Luck has the bluntly amusing refrain “You’re f*cked”.
Russell, otherwise relegated to the role of the tetchy spouse left behind, unleashes her splendidly expressive voice in the near-solo Such a Simple Thing. Addy is no singer but Harold’s main number requires empathy and raw emotion, which he has in spades, rather than tunefulness.
Elsewhere the score, like the plot, defaults to the sort of generic you-can-do-it, anything-is-possible platitudes you might find on a motivational poster. I feel like a heel for gently putting the boot into this ambulant odyssey, but Harold Fry left me admiring rather than genuinely moved.
To 18 April, haroldfrymusical.com.
