Latest news with #RachelJoyce
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry at Minerva Theatre, Chichester: A tearjerking musical trek...go armed with Kleenex
Easy mistake to make. You pop out to post a letter in south Devon and wind up walking all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed by the Scottish border. That of course is the set-up of Rachel Joyce's highly emotional 2012 best-seller which has now become a musical about Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage to make up with an old friend dying in a hospice 500 miles away. Starring big huggable Mark Addy as the teetotal brewing rep who's devastatingly bereft, it takes time to, shall we say, 'find its feet' and spends a heart-warming first half massaging its plausibility. But it does so with buckets of good cheer, sending Harold off with a big gospel number in a petrol station, before attracting an evangelical mob after his journey goes viral on Instagram. He even gets a shaggy dog puppet to go with his seeming shaggy dog story. But the second half fairly knocked me out with a series of emotional roadside bombs. Nor will knowing they're coming protect you from their impact. Go armed with Kleenex. With a rich seam of folk running through music and lyrics by Passenger (aka indie singer-songwriter Michael David Rosenberg), our hearts are stirred with barn dancing when Harold meets his wife (Jenna Russell) as a young man, but they're also broken as we learn the truth about their son (Jack Wolfe). And it avoids mawkishness with robust wit, including a Slovakian doctor cursing her ex-husband: 'I'd no idea he was a father, when we left from Bratislava'. Katy Rudd's production is prone to youth theatre excesses and outré flower-power choreography. But wearing its heart on its sleeve and keeping faith with Harold's bizarre mission is very much the point. Russell as Harold's wife gets to censure him but also croon about her own bottled agonies with touching remorse. And where Addy's Harold looks like a leathery old rugby ball that's been kicked around a little too much, he too grows in stature as a character – step by step, song by song. Shucked, by contrast, is a musical with little more than smutty jokes at its core, where it really needs a proper, pumping cardiovascular system. A camp hit on Broadway, the remorselessly silly story about failure of the corn crop in Hicksville USA is non-stop gags. 'A grave mistake is burying grandma on a slope' is one of the best. 'A paper plane that doesn't fly is just stationery' is another. But writer Robert Horn is more interested in Carry On film sniggers. The stand-out moment in Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally's music and lyrics is Somebody Will, gloriously sung by Ben Joyce as jilted farmer Beau. It's a rare moment fusing humour and pathos with originality and verve. And as his inevitably named errant girlfriend Maizy, Sophie McShera is a pleasing cross between Ariana Grande and Dolly Parton, who falls for a devious 'corn doctor' podiatrist (Matthew Seadon-Young) who, in turn, owes money to the mob. American director Jack O'Brien's production runs like a lusty threshing machine in a tilting barn, fringed by drooping maize stalks. And Sarah O'Gleby's choreography, from the corn-tapping opener to the We Love Jesus hoedown, is inventive and energetic. The trouble is it's empty spectacle cheapened by a slew of facetious gags. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry runs until June 14.
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry — a pitch-perfect musical version
★★★★★In 2012 Rachel Joyce achieved unexpected literary success with her miraculously ordinary, defiantly down-to-earth novel about a man who goes out to post a letter and ends up walking the length of England. This humane, wryly funny musical is the latest art form to celebrate the fictional Harold Fry — a retired man who measures out his life in lawnmowing sessions until a message from a dying former colleague inspires an odyssey from Devon to Berwick. Mark Addy plays Harold just two years after a film of the book, starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, opened to mixed reviews. Why risk a musical then, sceptics might ask. Yet this assured, pitch-perfect production — with a ravishing indie-folk score by Passenger — quickly dispels any
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review – life-affirming musical reckons with death
There is nothing like impending death to concentrate the mind on life. Certainly not for Harold Fry, the Bunyanesque modern-day everyman who goes out to post a letter to his terminally ill, long-lost friend and ends up hiking 500 miles to say goodbye to her in person. Harold (Mark Addy), middle-aged and mournful, leaves his Devon home and his distant, disenchanted wife, Maureen (Jenna Russell), to go to the post office. But he is inspired by a petrol station attendant (Sharon Rose, twinkling as Garage Girl) to begin his secular pilgrimage to the Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice where Queenie (Amy Booth-Steel) lies dying. The development of this musical follows a familiar trajectory: it is an adaptation of a best-selling novel (by Rachel Joyce), which has already been turned into a film starring national treasures (Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton). If sentiment laced the story in its original form, then schmaltz led the latter incarnation. The same syrupy, unabashed sentimentality roves through this show, adapted by Joyce herself. But its winning twist lies in the music, composed by singer-songwriter Michael Rosenberg, otherwise known as Passenger, which blasts the story through with folksy heart and foot-stomping soul. One belter follows another from the first song, Rise Up, to the last, Here's One for the Road. The tunes are twinned with vibrant choreography by Tom Jackson Greaves and director Katy Rudd's imaginative staging fuels the show's idiosyncratic spirit. It is performed within a luminous circle on Samuel Wyer's playfully lo-fi set, an abstract back-screen reflecting the changing landscape, with actors standing in for trees, sheep and washing lines. Some scenes break out into fantasy, garish and whirling at times, witty at others. Together, it has the makings of a quirky West End transfer, in the mould of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Jack Wolfe is compelling, first as the Balladeer and then as Harold and Maureen's dead son. He has an uncanny resemblance to Earl Cave (his counterpart in the film) and is an almost ubiquitous presence, first benign, then agitating and angry. Russell is slowly, icily magnificent as a woman estranged from herself, while Addy's Harold, stolid and unremarkable, comes alive slowly, as if thawing back into feeling all of life's pain and joy that he has thus far held at bay. Harold's unlikely Instagram stardom attracts a band of pilgrims/outcasts and they bring broadness and warmth albeit earnestness too. In fact, the stray dog – an exquisite puppet – outshines them all. The book's discussions around faith are muted and emotions come in primary colours, while the script abounds with wholesome mottoes for life. Yet still it does not pull its punches around the messiness of grief and the anger around loss. It pulls you irrepressibly in with its rousing message that life is not for regret but for kindness, gratitude – and most of all for living. At Minerva theatre, Chichester, until 14 June
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rachel Joyce: My favourite read is like Emma Bovary meets Quentin Tarantino
Born in 1962, Rachel Joyce worked as a nanny, door-to-door saleswoman, barmaid and actress. And although she has written since she was a child, her debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was not published until she was 50. She has more than made up for the time: Harold Fry won a National Book award, was longlisted for the Booker prize and, more recently, adapted into a film starring Jim Broadbent. She has since published six other novels, including Miss Benson's Beetle, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North and The Homemade God. I am lucky enough as a radio writer to have adapted several of the classics for BBC Radio 4, but the one I always wanted — and
