REVIEW: Chichester's Harold Fry offers beautiful hymn to hope

Why on earth would you want to turn The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry into an unlikely musical? Well, all the answers are here – one of the most beautiful, the most powerful and the most poignant evenings the Minerva has ever seen.

Director Katy Rudd imbues it all with huge compassion and remarkable flow as we travel the length of the country without leaving our seats. This is a story which could have been wrecked by endless film projections showing us places along the way. But this is a production far classier than that, instead allowing uniformly superb performances, the spot-on music of Passenger and our own imagination to create the magic.

This is a journey through horridly dark places but a journey told with the utmost sensitivity in a show which understands with astonishing clarity and intimacy just how appalling the toll is that trauma can take on us – and just how much physical movement, in this case Harold’s pilgrimage, can unlock that trauma and ultimately if not ease it, then at least offer a way of living with it. If you’ve been there, this will feel remarkably close to home. But crucially, it’s a story which lifts powerfully as it moves towards a place of hope.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry gets off to an instantly engaging start with the song Rise Up unfurling around a dead-eyed Harold, beautifully played by Mark Addy in his first-ever musical. Then comes the brilliant garage girl song Walk Upon The Water, and you think you’ve witnessed the night’s great highlight. It’s superb how Addy’s eyes come alive as Sharon Rose sings.

But wrong. There are plenty more songs to come which are just as empowering – plus plenty of songs that will break your heart. Addy’s is a performance which grows and grows, toweringly so, as the lifeless broken man who decides on a whim to finish unfinished business by walking from Devon to Berwick Upon Tweed.

The night is the story of all that shifts within him, spurred on by the people he meets along the way – and ultimately by the wife he leaves behind (again brilliant, from Jenna Russell), their marriage apparently beyond repair because of the unspoken agony between them.

Garage girl is terrific. So too is the emigre doctor (Madeleine Worrall) with the hilarious song whose title I had better not reproduce here. And that’s the point. There is so much genuine humour here amid the bleakness, and somehow it’s the hope that shines through. Also beautiful from Jack Wolfe as the balladeer/someone else (let’s not spoil it).

The ensemble on stage, the inventiveness of the staging and the sureness of the direction give the whole thing terrific fluidity and energy. It looks great, and Passenger’s songs and the story mesh perfectly. You would expect there to be one or two weaker songs but there absolutely aren’t. The result leaves you choked and uplifted in equal measure – a genuinely special night at Chichester Festival Theatre. You’ve got to see this.