“The past is a foreign country: they do
things differently there.” No more differently than in the West End,
where the now-proverbial opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel is
chopped in half and thrown away ten minutes before the end of this
musical version.
Director Roger Haines, revisiting his 2011 regional première of Richard
Taylor and David Wood’s adaptation, admirably refuses to inflate things
for Shaftesbury Avenue. I can’t remember when, or even whether, I last
saw a full West End musical production accompanied only by a solo piano
at one corner of the stage, with its player visibly conducting choric
vocal sequences. It lends matters a distinctly “chamber” air, as does
the musical structure. The piece feels more through-composed than it in
fact is, but nevertheless this is not an evening of discernible
break-out numbers, rather a flow from recitative to semi-recitative.
The nearest to individual songs – perhaps “arias” would be a better
term – are those sung principally or entirely by the older Leo Colston
as he recalls a summer spent more than fifty years earlier in 1900 with
the upper-class Norfolk family of a schoolfriend, when he found himself
innocently pulled into the role of “postman” in a love affair between
the daughter of the big house and a tenant farmer. Older Leo and his
reflections are a much more integral part of the proceedings here than
in either the novel or Joseph Losey’s 1971 film scripted by Harold
Pinter. Consequently, the casting of Michael Crawford in one of his
now-rare stage appearances is much more than a matter of bankability: a
performer of the requisite age and skill is essential, and Crawford is
unmatched in this area. He retains a delicacy in his voice even as it
soars (sometimes hesitantly) in recollection or duets with his
12-year-old self (played on press night by an excellent William
Thompson).
Nevertheless, without the attraction of Crawford’s name a resolutely
minor-key, innately English production such as this would do no
business in the West End. It is almost over-exposed, and would
certainly be more comfortable in a larger studio venue (or perhaps the
proposed new Sondheim Theatre) rather than the nearly 800-seat Apollo.
Written for the Financial
Times.