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This all-singing version of Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic novel has certainly taken a long route home: written and composed by German duo Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay, ‘Rebecca’ premiered in Vienna in 2006, and has been translated into ten languages, but is only now finally receiving its English language premiere, following the murky and convoluted collapse of a Broadway production due to have run a decade ago.
If it’s a slightly underwhelming note for a show once tipped for enormous stages, its eventual English debut – in a translation by Christopher Hampton – feels like a coup for the small Charing Cross Theatre, although we’re promised a lavish 18-piece orchestra (the economics of this would seem to be pretty mind-boggling but hey ho).
Directed by Alejandro Bonatto, the story is naturally the same as the book, following an unnamed young woman who is swept away by dashing widower Maxim de Winter. They soon marry and she comes to live at his isolated Cornish estate, but she is unsettled by the hostility towards her from those apparently still loyal to his late first wife, the eponymous Rebecca.