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Susan’s Bookshelves: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and was moved by it, soon after it was published in January 2013.  It is, indeed an unlikely premise for a novel as a sad, rather lonely, 60 something man impulsively decides to walk from his home in Cornwall to visit Queenie a former work colleague in Berwick-on-Tweed because she has written to say she is dying.

I also saw, and quite liked, the 2023 film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton although inevitably it lost some of the nuances of the novel.  This week I am scheduled to review a musical version, adapted by Joyce herself, at Chichester Festival Theatre. I have to say that Musical Theatre in this context  seems an unlikely (sorry) development but of course I’m reserving judgement. Meanwhile I have re-read the novel to remind myself of what Joyce actually wrote in the first place.

And what I found was even more heartrending than I remembered because, of course, we respond to literature in different ways at different stages of our lives. The novels, poems and plays don’t change.  But readers do. When I first read it, I had recently bombed off to Canada to escape the Olympics and had a pleasant break motoring round Vancouver Island with my beloved and energetic husband and we were just booking a city break in Philadelphia. Today I am a widow living alone – independent, healthy and content, but it’s a very different life informed by some pretty devastating lifestyle changes.

Harold Fry’s marriage is troubled. He and Maureen – lustily as they once loved each other – don’t communicate much and Joyce gradually reveals their issues through alternating chapters. We walk with Harold, in his unsuitable shoes, communing with nature, reflecting on the past and meeting people from whom he learns a lot about life. In that sense it is very much a traditional quest story with stopping points such as the Very Famous Actor he meets at a book signing and then over urinals and Martina, a doctor from Slovakia who takes Harold in and tends to his feet although, as an immigrant she can get only cleaning work in the UK.

At the same time we meet buttoned-up Maureen at home, cleaning obsessively, missing Harold and eventually pouring out her problems to Rex, the rather lovely widower next door. In time things escalate when Harold accidentally attracts publicity and other people join him on his walk but it soon it gets out of hand and he has to break free. At one point Maureen and Rex drive to Darlington to speak to him face to face rather than waiting for his phone calls or postcards.

The real issue is their son David. Harold is haunted by his own miserable childhood with an inadequate father and wanted to do better by his own son but things went wrong. We gradually learn that  David, clever and accepted at Cambridge, fell off the rails with unhappiness, drink and drugs. Harold is dominated by guilt, disappointment and regret. Something happened twenty years ago and Harold hasn’t seen David since although Maureen speaks to him every day on the phone – or so it seems. Bound up with whatever happened two decades ago is something involving Queenie and Harold’s job. Joyce drops hints and keeps us guessing for a very long time.

Ultimately this is a rich and warm novel about redemption, reconciliation and the importance of self-forgiveness. And that’s where the titular pilgrimage actually leads. Of course, Harold does get to poor, very sick Queenie but in a sense that’s an anticlimax. The important thing is the “celestial city” which Harold doesn’t, for many hundreds of miles, realise he’s seeking –  his marriage to Maureen. Yes, I wept at the end.

Since I first read this compelling novel, Rachel Joyce has written two linked ones: The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (2015) and Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North (2022) neither of which I have read but shall do soon.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh

Maidstone Symphony Orchestra

Maxim Calver

Brian Wright

Mote Hall, Maidstone

 

17 May 2025

 

Elgar’s last major work, the 1919 cello concerto, is one of those gut-wrenchingly beautiful pieces which simply can’t be heard too often. And Maxim Calver, in his fourth appearance with MSO, dug out plenty of the soulful anguish and autumnal sadness which the piece demands while also infusing it with rich tonal warmth. There was a spirited account of the scherzo marked by scrupulous, visible co-ordination between Calver and Wright, and an adagio so sumptuously expressive that it almost hurt. Yes, I’m not surprised to be informed, by Wright in his introduction that Calver is “going places fast.”

Telling the audience, but doing it with unusual poise, that he doesn’t normally speak before encores and that Bach is, in his view, too personal to play in public, Calver explained that he wanted to dedicate part of a Bach suite to David Watkin. Watkin was, he said, “a titan of the cello industry” and had died, aged only 60 earlier that week. He then played the Bach with loving precision which added extra poignancy.

Calver’s appearance was preceded by Wagner’s 1840 Faust Overture which was new to me and, I suspect, to most of the audience. Cue for lots of Germanic drama in minor keys and brooding string work. And there aren’t many concerts which open with a tuba solo: bravo Andy Bridges. The percussive interjections from all sections require a lot of precision and, under the very dynamic guest leader Christian Helstead, they mostly got it.

And so to the joyful glories of Sibelius’s Symphony No 5  (1915). As always with Sibelius there are an awful lot of string notes beneath the big brass statements and they were delivered with aplomb in the first movement which also brought us some very accomplished flute work and fine timp playing from Keith Price. I admired the cleanness of the pizzicato passages in the andante too.

Interestingly, Wright  (and, I think, Halstead)  allowed me to hear elements in the last movement which are usually submerged in the texture. Normally it’s the grandeur of the horns you hear but at this performance my attention was also drawn by counter melodies in the upper strings – far more than what string players  ruefully call “scrubbing” or “knitting”  – and that was fascinating. And full marks to Wright and the orchestra for those final, dramatic chords which were as crisply rich as I’ve ever heard them.

A resounding end to another good season.

‘Accomplished revival’ ★★★★

Rattigan’s 1952 play is set a year earlier and has been revived many times. In this production the peeling wallpaper and shabby furniture (set by Peter McKintosh) plunges us immediately into 1950s austerity in an unfashionable part of London.

Hester (Tamsin Grieg, reprising her role from the production at Theatre Royal, Bath last year) is deeply troubled. She has left the wealthy husband, now a judge (Nicholas Farrell) whom she can’t love for a younger, out-of-work former RAF pilot (Hadley Fraser) who is unreliable and unhappy. Thus she finds herself between the devil and the titular deep blue sea. The play’s famous opening presents Hester lying in front of the gas fire having attempted to take her own life before she is discovered by neighbours and the landlady.

Grieg finds all the dazed anxiety that her character needs, sometimes smiling superficially to cover her turmoil and when she screams and shouts it’s almost physically painful to listen to. Her emotional range is very impressive. There is also an outstanding performance from Finbar Lynch as the tight-lipped, struck off doctor who helps Hester. He is so ungiving –  until the very end of the play – that he’s hilarious. We are left wondering what he did to be jailed because he is clearly medically very competent. Rattigan’s original draft hinted at homosexuality but the play, as we now know it, leaves us to speculate.

Farrell, as you’d expect, brings dignified angst to the ever reasonable Collyer, and Fraser excels as the hard drinking, rather tragic figure yearning for the unobtainable and unable to make Hester happy. There’s also a fine, nicely observed performance from Selina Cadell as the garrulous, nosey but well-meaning landlady.

It is however, the quality of the direction which really makes this production fly. Lindsay Posner knows, really knows, what he’s doing and the pregnant pauses are masterly as, repeatedly, one character says something and everyone else simply looks stunned, delighted, horrified, outraged or whatever as it sinks in before anyone else speaks. This often creates rueful, very effective, comedy which is not something one necessarily associates with this play. But it works perfectly.

It’s quite a treat to see theatre as accomplished as this.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

by Terence Rattigan

Directed by Lindsay Posner

Theatre Royal Haymarket from Wednesday 7 May – Saturday 21 June 2025

Box Officewww.trh.co.uk

CAST

Tamsin Greig as Hester Collyer

Hadley Fraser as Freddie

Finbar Lynch as Miller

Nicolas Farrell as Sir William Collyer

Selina Cadell as Mrs Elton

Preston Nyman as Philip Welch

Lisa Ambalavanar as Ann Welch

Marc Elliott as Jackie Jackson

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-the-deep-blue-sea-by-terence-rattigan-at-theatre-royal-haymarket-until-21-june-2025

REVIEW: Alright, Alright, Alright by Adam Fitzgerald at Bridge House Theatre 13 – 24 May 2025

Susan Elkin • 14 May 2025

‘lurches into the surreal, and quite literally loses the plot’ ★ ½

 

For something that is billed as a comedy there are very few laughs in this play. I saw it on opening night – where I was 8% of the sparse audience – and most of us were stony faced throughout.

Leonard (Kieran Slade) is a nervous, geeky film buff who’d quite like promotion at work. In this he is encouraged by his friend/work colleague, Jasmine (Isabella Inchbald). The boss’s daughter Elyse (Rosina Aichner) is reasonably friendly while colleague Bradley (Adam Fitzgerald who wrote the play) is a brash Australian employee shoving a spanner in the works.  Then it all lurches into the surreal, and quite literally loses the plot, when Leonard goes home and the actor Martin McConaughey (Adam Fitzgerald doubling) leaps out of a VHS tape and announces he’s a genie. Hmm. 

 

What on earth this tortuous play is meant to be about is a mystery. Is it a homage to Martin McConaughey? There are a lot of cultish references to his films but if you’re not familiar with them then that falls flat. Is it about the relationship between parents and children? Aichner doubles quite effectively as Leonard’s well meaning but irritating mother and Inchbald is strong as Elyse’s humourless, tyrannical German mother who owns the company the others work for although it’s very much a stereotype. Or maybe it’s about building self-esteem and “finding your identity” – a pretty clichéd cop-out if so.

It’s a pity because a lot of work has clearly gone into this production. Moreover the cast are doing their best with a flawed muddle of a play. Inchbald in particular finds plenty of nuance in the long suffering Jasmine and Slade manages the contrast between Leonard and his all-American alter ego Leo (inspired by McConaughey) reasonably well.

Alright, Alright, Alright runs 80 minutes without interval and it gives me no pleasure at all to report that it feels a lot longer.

Alright, Alright, Alright by Adam Fitzgerald at Bridge House Theatre 13 – 24 May

Directed by Neta Gracewell

Box Office https://thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk/shows/alright-alright-alright/

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine:https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-alright-alright-alright-by-adam-fitzgerald-at-bridge-house-theatre-13-24-may-2025

The Children

Lucy Kirkwood

Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington

 

Star rating: 3.5

 

Lucy Kirkwood’s 90 minute play, which premiered at The Royal Court in 2016 is an interesting and perspicacious piece. And like all the best drama it functions at more than one level. On the surface it’s about living with, and in the aftermath of nuclear power station accident known as “the disaster”. More generally it forces us to confront the responsibilities older people have to future generations.

A taut three hander, The Children presents Hazel (Rosanna Preston) and Robin (Jon Gilmartin), both retired nuclear engineers, being visited by their former colleague and friend Rose (Trudi Dane). There is a lot to catch up with and baggage to sort including an old affair between Robin and Rose. The cottage Hazel and Robin now live in (very realisitic kitchen set by Rob Hebblethwaite) is 10 miles from the derelict power station which is now in an exclusion zone. They haven’t seen Rose for a long time but eventually it transpires that she has returned from America with an altruistic agenda – which presents an existential crisis for all three.

Preston is  convincing as the bustling, practical Hazel dealing with limited power in the cottage, proactively looking after her own health which includes  yoga and healthy meals prepared from very limited supplies. Only when she gets angry and feels threatened do we get a glimpse of the nuclear physicist she once was.

Trudi Dane excels as Rose, more vulnerable than her worldly manner suggests. Much more glamorous than Hazel who has four children and some grandchildren, she doesn’t look anything like the 65 she claims to be and I couldn’t make up my mind whether that was a casting issue or a deliberate decision to make Rose look half Hazel’s age. Either way Rose is, by implication because of exposure to radiation, in remission from cancer just as Robin, ominously starts to bleed from his gums after an altercation with his wife. Gilmartin’s Robin is a mixture of ineffectual bumbling, memories of sexual adventures and kindness to his wife. The three-way balance is tight.

This is a well directed (Jonathan Reed) quite compelling account of a fine play. It is also touching in another way. The production is dedicated to the much missed John Chapman who died suddenly last year. For a long time John, who often directed and acted (very good in Krapp’s Last Tape) was my main contact at Tower Theatre and I used to meet him at first nights elsewhere.  He was cast as Robin in The Children but his death two weeks before the show would have gone up meant that it had to be postponed until now.

I’ve never quite got into Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series but I’ve happily lapped up several of her standalones and so was pleased to find this volume of short stories, published in 2024.

Yes, the uncapitalised title says it all. They don’t. These stories plunge us into a world of talking horses, fairytale princesses, hapless women trying to pick a way through the 21st century, a character called Franklin who keeps popping up at different points in his doomed (maybe) life.  There’s a sparky story about the engagement he gets himself trapped into but there’s something very odd about the coven of women in the family home of his future wife, as he soon discovers.  Each of these stories is a discrete tale but there are witty cross references, The Void, for example is a world shattering phenomenon somewhere between Covid and what happened in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos – and, after one story, which is centred on it, is repeatedly referred to as a quirky, quasi dystopian given.

In places these stories are laugh-aloud funny. My favourite is about a second-rate, dimmish American actress and porn star named Skylar who meets a “spare” British prince who falls in love with her. Not, of course, that it rang any bells …

And I loved Pamela! who thinks and talks in exclamation marks and has “been thoroughly divorced for some years now.” The characterisation is terrific. Yes of course she’s exaggerated, like a well-meaning, but absurd, Jane Austen character, but the observation is bitingly shrewd. We all know a Pamela!

And woven into all this are issues of fertility, folklore and the conventions of fairy tale narrative: the Queen, for example, who rules over a queendom that is between sunrise and sunset and whose heart is “sore because she had no child”. So she visits a wise woman, who of course, lives deep in the heart of a nearby forest and the deal, inevitably comes with a curse. And that’s linked with Florence, who lives in a different milieu and whose family is seeking a benign au pair.

These intelligent stories are wickedly clever, often surreal and gripplingly entertaining.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

 

Philharmonia

Bach Choir

David Hill

 

Royal Festival Hall

 

08 May 2025

 

There is no doubt that the Bach Choir is one of our finest.  And at this concert they were working  seamlessly with the Philharmonia, ably led on this occasion by Colin Scobie. The orchestra  was also in fine form despite some programming and presentational misjudgements.

The evening started with The Song of the High Hills by Frederick Delius which was new to me and doesn’t get out much. Having now heard it I can see why. It’s full of vague colour and never, in thirty minutes, seems to go anywhere much although there was some good timp work on three sets and some impressively controlled pianissimo passages while the choir provided occasional wafty or growling effects which must be pretty challenging to do. No, I am not a worshipper at the shrine of Delius.

Presumably in an attempt to brighten it up, we sat in darkness with the choir holding torches and were subjected to a slide show – very much like a boring 1960s evening when someone imposed their holiday transparencies on you. In this case it was glaciated scenery (Scotland? Norway? We weren’t told) which, of course, as visual images always do, simply distracted from the music.

The second work was a rather impressive world premiere by Richard Blackford: La Sagrada Famila Symphony. My heart sank when I realised that the screen was still in place and we were going to get more projection but actually the filmed images from Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona which inspired the piece added interest – especially at a first hearing although it tends to relegate the music to background status. Loosely speaking, the symphony follows the Christian passion from anxiety through despair to triumph. High spots included the filigree harp work in the opening movement, splendid brass fanfares with two additional trumpeters high up in boxes and a movingly plaintive cello solo in the second movement.

The triumph of the evening, however, came after the interval with a glitteringly good rendering of Belshazzar’s Feast and the reason, I suspect, why most of the audience was there. One of William Walton’s best loved works (this was the second time I’ve heard it this year) it simply tells one of the most dramatic stories in the Bible with so much verve and excitement that it must be huge fun to sing and play. And it was clear we were in for a treat from the moment we heard the compellingly incisive male voice choral narration at the opening. And bass soloist Christopher Purves ensured that every single word of the story was crystal clear – how nice, too to see him evidently enjoying the performance with smiles and barely perceptible body movement when he wasn’t singing.

Conductor David Hill really knows how to heighten the excitement especially during the musical description of Belshazzar’s luxurious excesses all spikily delivered by a battery of percussion. This performance also used an antiphonal brass band with six additional players lined up each side behind the side wing audience so we really were surrounded by sound. The tam tam and clicks as the writing appears on the wall were as sinister as I’ve ever heard them and Hill brought the whole piece to a resounding triumphant climax. Alleluia indeed.

 

The Gang of Three

Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky

Directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward

The Spontaneity Shop

Kings Head Theatre

 

Star rating: 3

 

Photograph: Manuel Harlan

It’s quite refreshing to see a grown-up, old fashioned play which depends almost entirely on good writing, words, wit and acting – no actor musos, fancy lighting or theatrical gimmickry. The titular trio are Tony Crossland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey slugging it out for power mostly in the late 1970s with one flashback to 1940s Oxford.

Labour prime minister,Harold Wilson needs a new deputy so which of these political giants is to be? In the event, of course, it was none of them. Then comes Wilson’s unexpected resignation but none of them becomes leader either. We then move on to Thatcher’s landslide victory and Jenkins’s decision to found the SDP.

Now, I’m old enough to remember these events (apart from 1940, obviously) with some clarity and it was interesting to watch the play alongside many audience members for whom this all took place before they were born. Yet, much of it remains topical. Jenkins was a passionate European but the Labour Party in general was opposed to British membership. Every mention of it in this play gets a laugh. There are some good lines about trade tariffs too. Nothing is new in politics.

So, in a play of this sort how far do you caricature and how far do you simply develop the character imaginatively? Hywel Morgan gives us a pretty convincing Jenkins – articulate, earnest, exasperated, shrewd and with a very slight stammer. It’s well judged and plausible. As Crossland, Alan Cox is a good foil but, competent as his acting is, the character seem lightweight. Crossland was, actually a formidable politician of whom history would probably have heard a great deal more had he not died at in 1977 when he was only 59. Here we see Crossland trying to seduce Jenkins at Oxford – although that isn’t pivotal –  and thereafter goading him self-interestedly as he jockeys for position and power. Jenkins comments on his fine mind but we don’t see much evidence of it in this play.

Then there’s Dennis Healey. Colin Tierney, complete with prosthetic “prawn” eyebrows hams him up the hilt. He gives him a stilted, declamatory  quasi-rheotrical speech mode which is funny until it palls. And it doesn’t sound remotely like the Healey I remember delivering the budget in the 1970s. It’s good comedy but somehow that detracts from the seriousness of the play because it’s overdone.

Generally speaking though there’s plenty to like in The Gang of Three – three actors bouncing adeptly off each other, for example and Libby Watson’s floor to ceiling bookshelf set works well for each different room we’re meant to be in. The radio and TV news flashes to cover scene changes are effective too. Despite its flaws, it’s an entertaining 90 minutes of theatre.