Public the Musical – Curve, Leicester

Created by Stroud and Notes

Music and Lyrics: Kyla Stroud, Natalie Stroud and Olivia Zachariah

Writers: Hannah Sands, Kyla Stroud, Natalie Stroud and Olivia Zachariah

Director: Hannah Sands

Six years in the making, Public – The Musical arrives at Curve carrying considerable festival pedigree. Born from songs written during lockdown in 2020, developed through a first run at VAULT Festival in 2022 – where it won the Origins Award – and honed further at Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, where it took Playbill’s Pick of the Fringe Award, this is a production that has earned its place at a full-scale venue. The Curve run marks its most substantial staging yet, with an expanded script and a 90-minute running time that dispels any concern about whether the material can sustain the stretch. It can, and with room to spare.

The premise is simple: four strangers, trapped overnight in a public toilet. It’s the classic device – incompatible people forced into proximity, obliged to confront one another and, eventually, themselves – but the setting gives it a fresh and often very funny dimension. We meet each of them before they enter, glimpsing the small indignities that send them through the door: a café that won’t let you use the facilities without buying something, a shoe requiring urgent attention after an encounter with a dog. Amy Jane Cook’s set is spot on – entirely recognisable, the hand dryer and all, and a surprisingly versatile space for the action that unfolds within it.

The expanded version wisely abandons real-time constraints, playing the piece across the course of a night. It’s a good decision, as the relationships and revelations here – and there are several, carefully timed – could not realistically have developed in an hour. The extended form allows scenes between smaller configurations of characters, some of them asleep, creating space for the more intimate, reflective exchanges that add extra emotional strength.

The four characters are clearly drawn and played with real skill. Matt Corner is Andrew, a macho investment banker whose world has contracted to his expensive bike and his own blinkered certainties – misogynistic, contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t fit his worldview, and entirely unaware of it. It’s a difficult type to play without tipping into caricature, and Corner keeps him just credible enough to make his eventual shifts land. Grace Towning is Zo, an activist en route to a protest, and it’s a tribute to the writing and to Towning’s performance that Zo is genuinely, recognisably irritating – well-meaning to her core, but incapable of meeting people where they are. You understand her completely and find yourself exasperated in equal measure. Ivano Turco brings a quiet, fragile quality to Finlay, a fast-food worker holding himself together with some effort, and sometimes failing; his is the most inward of the four performances, and the most affecting. Cole Dennis rounds out the quartet as Laura, non-binary, good-natured, instinctively diplomatic – the person trying to keep the peace while missing a flight to a wedding. The four work well together, and the ensemble vocal work throughout is exceptional with tight harmonies that never come at the expense of clarity.

The pop-rock score is one of the production’s real strengths. There are numbers that catch the ear immediately, upbeat and propulsive, and others that pull back into something gentler and more reflective as the night wears on and the characters begin to lower their defences. Crucially, every lyric is audible – no small thing in a musical where the songs are doing genuine narrative work, as here they are.

Hannah Sands’ direction keeps the 90 minutes moving without sacrificing the quieter moments that give the piece its depth. What they have all built together – five years from bedroom to Curve – is funny, warm, and genuinely moving. The laughs are plentiful, but what stays with you is something rather more than that.

Public – The Musical is well worth catching before it leaves Leicester on 13 June though surely it will have a life beyond that.

Runs until 13 June 2026