One Day: The Musical, Edinburgh review: 'exhilarating'
There’s a rough-edged, down-to-earth magic about this adaptation of David Nicholls’s much-loved novel, writes Joyce McMillan
One Day: The Musical, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★
It may be a love story, but it’s no fairytale, wrote one London critic of David Nicholls’s novel One Day, when it was first published in 2009. And the single most thrilling thing about the Lyceum Theatre’s new stage version of the story - co-produced with London company Melting Pot, and premiered this week in a Lyceum magically transformed into a glowing, in-the-round cafe space - is the boldness and integrity with which it embraces Nicholls’s clear-eyed realism, as well as his profound belief in the importance and endurance of love.
It’s arguable, after all, that there are a few too many musicals like One Day around, in the 2020s; shows that feature good looking young professionals emoting desperately in song about their complicated inner lives, while the world burns around them. In One Day, Dex and Emma spend a magical 24 hours together on their 1988 graduation day from Edinburgh University, and then remain friends through all the ups and downs of the next 15 years - horrible jobs in grubby restaurants, professional false starts, failed relationships, sudden success and spectacular meltdown - before finally becoming a couple in their mid-thirties.
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Like the novel, though, David Greig’s stage adaptation - with a beautiful and witty playlist of songs by Abner and Amanda Ramirez, and additional lyrics by Jeremy Sams - handles this familiar material with a sharp intelligence and self-awareness that is always enjoyable, and sometimes transformational.
One Day is partly a story about class; Dex is a posh Edinburgh Uni boy, Emma a working-class girl from Leeds with strong political views, and their awareness of that difference - and how it plays out in their post-university careers - helps situate this story perfectly in the whole narrative of post-1980s Britain, without any need for heavy-handed explanation. Emma becomes a teacher, Dex an overpaid television host; and sometimes, their intense encounters seem more like David Hare’s Skylight than Ghost The Musical, as values clash across widening social divides.
Love is the finally the answer, though, for Dex and Emma; and in Max Webster’s exhilarating production, the story is brought to life by a brilliant, swirling 13-strong supporting cast and chorus of friends, family and associates, while Sharon Rose and Jamie Muscato - both wonderful singers - deliver pitch-perfect performances as Emma and Dex.
The songs are poignant and lovely, often with brilliantly clever lyrics; the six-piece live band, in Lyceum-style boxes above the stage, play up a storm. And the whole show glows, in its transformed space, with a rough-edged, down-to-earth magic that fully recognises how love can seem all but impossible, in a broken world; but is still worth pursuing, to the last.
One Day: The Musical is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 19 April.
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