Haymarket Theatre Royal

The name gives ‘generic Britcom’ and the show doesn’t entirely fail to deliver on that. But this musical adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – a 2012 novel that was made into a film a couple of years back – has a fair few unlikely moments of its own, in a good way.  Joyce’s own stage adaptation certainly isn’t a glossy teeth, tits and showtunes affair. Katy Rudd’s production of this yarn about a taciturn man in his sixties having what I think is fair to describe as an elaborate mental breakdown reminded me quite a lot of the charmingly eccentric recent West End hit The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Both deal with oddball older protagonists from southwest England; both have supernatural elements; both eschew trad orchestration in favour of rustic folk songs, with the tunes here written by indie folkster Passenger. The story, then, concerns Harold (Mark Addy), a dully affable gent living a life of quiet routine with his pass agg wife Maureen (Jenna Russell). But then he receives a letter from Queenie (Maggie Service), a former colleague of his who he hasn’t seen in 20 years. She is writing to let him know that she is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, and she wants to thank him for the kindness he showed her in the past. He composes a hilariously terse letter of condolence and decides to walk down to the post box to send it, but finds that this doesn’t seem adequate and long story short he decides to walk from rural Devon to...

Ralph Fiennes has been beavering away busily over at Theatre Royal Bath this last year, curating and starring in a season of work at the prestigious South Western theatre. London seems very unlikely to get all of it, but here’s one nailed on transfer: Fiennes and Miranda Raison will star as the great Victorian actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Grace Pervades, the approximately millionth (well, thirty-second) play from the great David Hare (curiously it’ll run in the West End at the same time as a revival of his very early play Teeth ‘N’ Smiles). Jeremy Herrin directs the drama, which follows the stage legends plus Terry’s children Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig, and examines the dynasty’s wider influence on British theatre.