Writer: Tove Jansson
Book, Music and Lyrics: Hans Jacob Hoeglund
Director: Amanda Noar
Musical Director: Manuel Gageiro
Moominvalley in November is a new musical based on the last book in the well-loved Moomin series by Finnish author Tove Jansson. The production’s biggest flaw is its format. Trying to refashion the delicate fibres of Jansson’s enigmatic fiction in the brash, formulaic guise of a musical is a bold and possibly misguided project. But within these sometimes-strained parameters, the show is well executed. The music, singing, choreography and set design are all excellent. Produced by Annlouise Butt, this is the first full staging of an inventive, quixotic piece of musical theatre and brings a big-stage energy to a relatively intimate setting.
Tove Jansson wrote Moominvalley in November in 1970, after the death of her mother, and it’s the only book in the series where the Moomins themselves (a family of loveable anthropomorphic hippo-shaped trolls) don’t appear. Instead, six eccentric characters from previous novels set off on individual and slightly arcane quests and meet each other in Moominvalley, the sun-dappled dale where the family usually live in a warm, welcoming house.
In the original novel, Jansson opens with philosophical, green-hatted wanderer Snufkin setting off on his annual journey as “the forest wrapped him in a gentle and exquisite loneliness”, and it takes him a couple of chapters to turn back towards the valley. In Hans Jacob Hoeglund’s musical, Matthew Heywood’s charming Snufkin has not long doused his fire and played his mouth organ when he’s drawn into a big musical number. In the first song Moominvalley, the show’s six characters in search of the Moomins set out their different reasons for converging on the legendary homestead, a place that takes on a quasi-fairy-tale quality.
Toft, played by Izzie Winter with poignant innocence and determination, is a lonely child looking for a family. Jane Quinn’s breathless busybody, a self-loathing character called Fillyjonk, hopes to visit Moominmamma for some sympathetic company to soothe the angst of her obsessive cleaning. When the idiosyncratic Hemulen (played with nervy panache by Stuart Simons) meets Toft, the strangers finally begin to interact, coalescing around a shared yearning for the inexplicably absent Moomins “They were just like things that are always around, if you see what I mean … Like trees,” says Hemulen.
Cloth trees frame the stage and partly screen the four fabulous musicians, including smiling Musical Director Manuel Gageiro. With Jen Green’s orchestration, the versatile band produces an atmospheric soundtrack on keyboard and flute, violin, double bass and more. The rest of the stage set consists of a colourful tower representing the round, blue Moominhouse, which can be spun round to reveal a homely interior with a wood-burning stove. Lu Herbert’s set and costume designs have a beautifully simple, folk-tale feel. Chris McDonnell’s lighting is similarly accomplished, condensing, at one point, a whole sunrise-to-sunrise cycle into a matter of seconds.
The musical’s much-needed comedy comes mostly from Martin Callaghan’s perfectly-pitched Grandpa Grumble. An old man looking for fish in a misremembered brook, he befriends an imaginary ancestor who lives in the stove. Finally, Abigail Yeo’s pert Mymble dances onto stage, singing “It’s easy to enjoy yourself – most people never try”. Her whirl of upbeat confidence contrasts with the melancholic and uncertain streak the others share.
Despite the awkward sense that the grammar of the novel and the musical are pulling in opposite directions, the show is pretty faithful to the original text. People who haven’t read it might feel slightly lost. It relies on some prior acquaintance with the Moomin series to make much sense of the gossamer-fine story, conjuring a mysterious absence that suggests, like Becket’s Godot, the uses of faith and perhaps its futility.
Jansson said she “couldn’t go back and find that happy Moominvalley again” and so ended the series with this puzzling, but beautiful book. Toft is forever trying to reconstruct the happy valley in their imagination. The sense of loss and mourning is gradually overlaid by the characters’ stuttering attempts to form a new family. Director Amanda Noar helps tease out the various themes: sadness, joy, resilience, community, identity.
Swedish-born writer and composer Hoeglund grew up with the Moomins and perhaps assumes too much that the audience already knows and loves these peripheral characters. For fans of the novels, the stylised clichés of the set-piece songs could be jarring, but everyone involved is giving their all. In the end, it feels churlish not to let yourself get swept along in a strange story of the human need to combat loss and confusion through growth and connection.
Runs until 16 November 2025
