Book: Rachel Joyce
Music and Lyrics: Passenger
Director: Katy Rudd
Samuel Wyer’s designs for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry are thoughtful and spectacular. They turn a tale that could seem (literally) pedestrian into a luminous allegory. A huge circle inside the proscenium arch is ringed by other smaller circles, decked with ivy. Wyer compares it to: “a vast illuminated letter O at the start of our “Once upon a time…””, which “holds the story in a place of wonder and possibility”. Barrels lurk, ready to become part of the ever-changing set as Harold Fry makes his way across England. Musicians on stage at the start, including a harp player, add an Odyssean sense of epic grandeur to the simple story of a walk.
Mark Addy’s wonderfully stolid and exhausted Harold is the still point in a turning world, the everyman Bunyanesque Pilgrim, making his way through glowing landscapes and resonant motifs: footpath signs, Morris dancers, railway stations, festivals… Even a car wash becomes a stage full of twirling glittering razzmatazz as fabulous blue-haired Nicole Nyarambi sings that you can Walk upon the Water. The contrast between her quasi-biblical language and the banal clicking of price stickers onto cleaning products is genius.
The story follows Rachel Joyce’s original novel quite closely: retired brewery rep Harold Fry and his wife Maureen (Jenna Russell) are stuck in uneventful, stagnant lives. “Now every day is like the last and like the one before,” runs the song. Their suburban home in Devon, with muted palette and net curtains, contrasts with the wide, wild world outside. Former colleague Queenie Hennessy writes to say that she is dying in a Berwick on Tweed hospice.
Berwick, at the north-easterly tip of England near the Scottish Border, is hundreds of miles from Harold. But, after a chat in a garage on his way to post a reply, he impetuously decides to walk there. He becomes convinced that if he, unfit and ill-prepared, walks the length of England, Queenie will somehow survive her terminal cancer. Maureen is initially sceptical (“the only time you walk is to get to your car”), but she also needs to break free from their narrowed existence.
Each element of this well-loved tale is rendered transcendent in the musical version. The addition of mercurial Noah Mullins as The Balladeer, a puck-like figure with guitar and wreath of flowers, seems at first to add a whimsical folksy narrator, but gradually takes on more personal and devastating resonances.
Like any good pilgrimage, the journey has spiritual and psychological dimensions. Harold’s growing sense of community in the English countryside is matched by troubling reflections on his own life. He learns to see the kindness, strangeness, and individual tragedies of other people.
Varied music and lyrics by singer-songwriter Michael Rosenberg aka Passenger support rather than delay each stage of the journey with Tom Jackson Greaves’ sublime choreography bringing it all to life. There are country dancing vibes for the feisty opening number, a spot of tap dancing for the glorious gay love story Harold facilitates along the way, and evocative high-energy Slavic rhythms for the song Out of Luck (“I’m fucked”) from Slovakian doctor Martina (Gemma Atkins).
The buoyant ensemble is flawless. The dancers/actors work so well together, it’s hard to single out individuals, but Jenna Boyd is superlative as Sister Philomena and Timo Tatzber as the loveable Dog brings exceptional puppeteering skills to the stage. Maggie Service as Queenie and Peter Polycarpou as Rex the neighbour give these subsidiary roles full humanity.
Paule Constable’s lighting design and Ash J Woodward’s incandescent videos add a transfiguring dimension to the set: starry skies, lambent cityscapes, flocks of birds against a crimson sunset. When Harold first opens the door, sunlight pours through. The sound design by Ian Dickinson and Gareth Tucker integrates seamlessly with the music to hint at birdsong, lawnmowers, sheep, main roads or nighttime owls and barking foxes.
Author Rachel Joyce was an actor herself for two decades before she turned to writing and has written extensively for radio. Harold Fry, written while her own father was dying, was originally a radio script for three people. This West End musical version of her popular novel follows on from its celebrated premiere at Chichester Festival Theatre last summer.
Harold Fry has a great capacity to subvert and play with the conventions of the musical, stopping it from getting too messianic or sentimental. Just as the other characters are about to launch into an inspirational power ballad, Harold cuts them off with “Yes, yes, I know.” There are comic rhymes like “lost on us” with “preposterous” from Sister Philomena or “He’s about the same age as my nan, but he’s all over Instagram” in the agile number from Wilf (Ashley Samuels) that kicks off the second half.
This is a show created, crafted and performed by consummate theatrical professionals all working hard to move and entertain the audience. It’s rare that the same show contains both laugh-out-loud moments and handkerchief-wringing, but The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry nails it.
Runs until 18 April 2026
