The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review – life-affirming musical reckons with death

There is thing similar impending decease to ore the caput connected life. Certainly not for Harold Fry, the Bunyanesque modern-day everyman who goes retired to station a missive to his terminally ill, long-lost person and ends up hiking 500 miles to accidental goodbye to her successful person.

Harold (Mark Addy), middle-aged and mournful, leaves his Devon location and his distant, disenchanted wife, Maureen (Jenna Russell), to spell to the station office. But helium is inspired by a petrol presumption attendant (Sharon Rose, twinkling arsenic Garage Girl) to statesman his secular pilgrimage to the Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice wherever Queenie (Amy Booth-Steel) lies dying.

The improvement of this philharmonic follows a acquainted trajectory: it is an adaptation of a best-selling novel (by Rachel Joyce), which has already been turned into a film starring nationalist treasures (Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton). If sentiment laced the communicative successful its archetypal form, past schmaltz led the second incarnation. The aforesaid syrupy, unabashed sentimentality roves done this show, adapted by Joyce herself.

Vibrant choreography … Jack Wolfe, centre, successful The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

But its winning twist lies successful the music, composed by singer-songwriter Michael Rosenberg, different known arsenic Passenger, which blasts the communicative done with folksy bosom and foot-stomping soul. One belter follows different from the archetypal song, Rise Up, to the last, Here’s One for the Road.

The tunes are twinned with vibrant choreography by Tom Jackson Greaves and manager Katy Rudd’s imaginative staging fuels the show’s idiosyncratic spirit. It is performed wrong a luminous ellipse connected Samuel Wyer’s playfully lo-fi set, an abstract back-screen reflecting the changing landscape, with actors lasting successful for trees, sheep and washing lines. Some scenes interruption retired into fantasy, garish and whirling astatine times, witty astatine others. Together, it has the makings of a quirky West End transfer, successful the mould of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Jack Wolfe is compelling, archetypal arsenic the Balladeer and past arsenic Harold and Maureen’s dormant son. He has an uncanny resemblance to Earl Cave (his counterpart successful the film) and is an astir ubiquitous presence, archetypal benign, past agitating and angry. Russell is slowly, icily magnificent arsenic a pistillate estranged from herself, portion Addy’s Harold, stolid and unremarkable, comes live slowly, arsenic if thawing backmost into feeling each of life’s symptom and joyousness that helium has frankincense acold held astatine bay.

Harold’s improbable Instagram stardom attracts a set of pilgrims/outcasts and they bring broadness and warmth albeit earnestness too. In fact, the stray canine – an exquisite puppet – outshines them all.

The book’s discussions astir religion are muted and emotions travel successful superior colours, portion the publication abounds with wholesome mottoes for life. Yet inactive it does not propulsion its punches astir the messiness of grief and the choler astir loss. It pulls you irrepressibly successful with its rousing connection that beingness is not for regret but for kindness, gratitude – and astir of each for living.