While the old rocksteady Les Mis has been running in the West End pretty much unchanged since 1985, this other musical by its creators Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, also based on French history, has never been able to find its perfect form. Every time Martin Guerre has been revived since its poorly received premiere in 1996, the tale of the 16th-century peasant has received not only a tinkering around the edges but a complete gutting and reconstituting.
Surely if anyone can solve its complex plot of false identities and time jumps, it’s Matthew Warchus, originator of so many great musicals from Matilda to Groundhog Day, who attempts in his final act as the Old Vic’s artistic director finally to make Martin Guerre work.
But if this is the best version of the show, then we’ve got a problem. It’s not that it’s bad. Warchus and librettist Boublil and composer Schonberg have heavily streamlined proceedings. This becomes a simple story barrelling in one direction: man marries woman, is driven out of village, returns seven years later, may not be all he seems. Even in this semi-staged form, Warchus and designer Rob Howell make it look great with Traitors-esque black robes and simple splashes of colour coming from scarves and sashes, while red grit covers the floor, suggesting blood and soil and much else besides.
But it just all sounds so much like someone writing a less good version of Les Mis, with added lute for that 16th century tang. The bones are the same: nasty mobs, billowing flags, noble men with false identities, too many words stuffed into lines of recitative. At one point a sad woman sings a sad song and you’re slightly surprised it’s not ‘I Dreamed A Dream’.
Warchus brings his magical ability to marshall a large cast with ease, and to transform the stage from full chorus numbers to quiet solos in an instant. It’s a smart and seamless treatment of the show. There is none of the biliousness that Boublil and Schonberg are so prone to, and which makes Miss Saigon such a drag and Les Mis somehow such a gem.
A cracking cast carries it, too, especially Liv Andrusier’s Bertrande. She is forced to marry a man, condemned when he won’t sleep with her, and generally put upon in the way women in 1548 were. Andrusier packs a lot of power into her, especially in a defiant late moment, and she has no problem meeting the many high, sustained notes in the belting arias Schonberg gives the character.
But it is, simply, not a great musical. There are soaring solo melodies, contrapuntal chorus numbers, a sense of a score always bursting at its seams, but only a couple of numbers stand out - the title song and a swelling new anthem called ‘Someday’ - and the result is a restless musical about identity that can never quite find its own.
