You can see why Victor Hugo attracts the makers of musicals: his novels are almost excessively theatrical. After Boublil and Schönberg’s Les Misérables and Lionel Bart’s Quasimodo, we now have a new version of L’Homme qui rit (1869), already twice filmed, with a score by Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler and a book by Carl Grose. Although it still needs work, it makes for a wonderfully weird, macabre musical.
The novel is specifically set in late 17th-century England which, in Grose’s version, becomes a mythical Bristol. The disfigured hero, Grinpayne, is employed as a fairground freak, is loved by a sightless girl and aches to learn how his face came to be lacerated.
Even if Grose has radically adapted the story, we still get that classic Hugo mix of a personal quest and a passion for justice imbued with religious overtones. We deduce that Grinpayne’s plight may be connected to an earlier uprising against a monarchy that argues “to him that hath, much more shall be given”. But what is striking is how the sight of the Christ-like hero’s unmasked face is a source of spiritual uplift.
There is an awful lot of plot. Some sections could be pruned: a puppet-replay of the Beauty and the Beast fable seems superfluous since the connection is already obvious. But the virtue of the show is that it strikes the right balance between the romantic and the grotesque. The Phillips-Teitler numbers, scored for a mercifully small band, periodically soar without being slushy so that even a commonplace lyric like “bury your pain, start life again” lodges in the memory. The songs also allow scope for the comic as when a lustful duchess urges the monarchy’s resident fool to do “an erotic breakfast dance”.
Tom Morris’s production similarly shows the ability to mix different ingredients. Jon Bausor’s excellent design, framed by a grinning rictus of bared teeth, blends the carnivalesque and the gothic. Puppetry, by the War Horse team of Finn Caldwell and Toby Olie, includes a strikingly skeletal grey wolf and an expressive version of the boy Grinpayne. The performances also range from the heartfelt to the ironic. At the centre of the story, Louis Maskell manages to sing clearly and well through a masked mouth while Audrey Brisson as the sight-deprived Dea drains a tricky role of Chaplinesque pathos.
The standout performance, however, comes from Julian Bleach, of Shockheaded Peter fame, as the all-licensed fool. With his death’s-head features and abrasive voice, like a saw cutting through metal, Bleach is suitably chilling and also very funny as when, having wrestled with a trio of marionettes, he turns to us and admits “puppetry is not as easy as it looks.” Gloria Onitiri as a voracious duchess and Sean Kingsley as a fairground impresario provide good support and, while the musical takes far too long to come to a climax, it defies theatrical convention by simultaneously keeping its hand on its heart and its tongue in its cheek.
• At Bristol Old Vic until 13 November. Box office: 0117-987 7877
