Theatre review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry seemed like one of those shows I have an extreme reaction to: The sort of heartstring-tugging story that'll either have me sobbing uncontrollably or cringing halfway out of my skin. Neither really ended up happening in the end - certainly in the first half-hour I found it pretty unbearable, but Rachel Joyce (book) and Passenger's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Joyce's novel does end up more or less bearable. Recently-retired Harold (Transphobia Ltd Employee Mark Addy) lives a joyless life in Devon with funsponge wife Maureen (Jenna Russell,) until one morning he receives a letter informing him that old friend Queenie (Maggie Service) is in a hospice with terminal cancer. He writes a perfunctory response but when he tries to post it finds himself constantly putting it off and walking to the next postbox.

Eventually he just decides he's going to walk more or less the whole length of England to Berwick-upon-Tweed to deliver a more personal message to a woman he hasn't seen in twenty years, but who helped him in a difficult time in ways he never quite acknowledged to her.

Beginning with an unusually earnest garage attendant (Nicole Nyarambi,) Harold's pilgrimage largely involves interacting with sentient fortune cookies who tell him he can do anything he puts his mind to if he has faith, and while Addy doesn't sing or even say that much himself, he's accompanied by an invisible Balladeer (Noah Mullins) who expresses a lot of his inner life. And I'm not saying the Balladeer has major Dead Kid Symbolism, but he's dressed as Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in Dead Poets Society.

As he crosses the country in increasing exhaustion he picks up followers, starting with a stray dog (Timo Tatzber) and then humans after an influencer (Gleanne Purcell-Brown) makes him go viral. With Harold's journey not only having him confront the debt he owes Queenie but also the trauma he experienced 20 years earlier, there's a lot of quietly genuine emotion being explored here but unfortunately the folksy style of the storytelling and particularly Passenger's music tips far too much of it over into insufferably twee: Apart from belatedly coming to life in the finale "Here's One for the Road" the songs make no impact.

What brought me back to Katy Rudd's production after the interval was the occasional turn into something a bit more genuinely quirky and modern - one of the people seeking Harold's advice is an older gay man with a shoe fetish (Daniel Crossley,) who wants to know how to tell the younger man he meets up with for dom sessions that he actually loves him. And when the journey passes through Exeter, Samuel Wyer's design represents the city entirely through rugby shirts and stolen traffic cones which, in my experience, fair.

So I can't recommend The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - the people sitting next to me did leave at the interval so it's clearly not for everyone - and I wanted the songs to end as soon as they began. But the cast are generally good and Rudd manages to cut back on the cheesiness just enough to make it watchable.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, Peter Darling, Katy Rudd and Passenger, based on the novel by Rachel Joyce, is booking until the 18th of April at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.