One Day: The Musical - Royal Lyceum ★★★★

David Nicholls’ much-loved novel of love at arm’s length navigated over two decades is brought to the stage in a completely transformed Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.

Already adapted for the screen and then a pitch-perfect Netflix series, here we get the music theatre treatment of One Day – though whether this is a full-blown musical or a play with music is perhaps one of the questions this production is still trying to work out.

Aspiring novelist and would-be world-changer Emma Morley gets together with Dexter Mayhew at their Edinburgh University graduation party. This is, as the LED screen over the stage reminds us, 1988. Emma (Em) is a northern girl, Dex a posh boy. They spend the night together – it’s gentle, humorous and respectful – and they go to sleep to the sound of waking blackbirds. The next day, they go their separate ways, but over the next twenty years, they meet up annually on the same date to mark their one day/night together. In this way, we see Em and Dex move into middle age, following different, and what may become irreconcilable, trajectories.

The trick with any adaptation of One Day is for Dex, Em and their friends to be plausible not only as students but also as they grow older. In the early scenes, some of the supporting cast overcompensate for their age with a desperate energy that doesn’t convince. No such issues arise with Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose, whose captivating central performances quite literally save the day.

What holds One Day together is the chemistry between Dex and Em, and Muscato and Rose have that in spades. They also have the emotional range to shift seamlessly between light banter teetering on the edge of a deeper attachment and the pain of loss and guilt. It’s when Dexter, on his gap year travels, tries to write home to Em that this production snaps into focus. He stutters towards articulate communication, and as Muscato’s remarkable voice takes wing, we understand there is far more to this young man than the shallow Tory boy he could so easily be taken for. Muscato rides the waves effortlessly in this production, from heated alcoholic to Hugh Grant soundalike, and with an ability to sing through his later grief that is genuinely affecting.

As Emma, Sharon Rose more than holds her own, with a nice line in ironic put-downs and a fiery commitment to social justice. Her big numbers also have musical heft, but there is a disconnect between her musical outbursts of frustration and the quiet humour and observations that we love her for.

Together, Muscato and Rose find a stillness in what is often a hyperenergetic production, and their conversations – spoken and sung – are (together with Dan Buckley’s jokey, affectionate Ian) much the best thing about the evening. It is almost entirely down to them that Nicholls’ understated tale isn’t submerged by the show’s bumper bag of theatrical tricks.

In a co-production with independent production company Melting Pot, the Lyceum has endeavoured to reflect the story’s intimacy by transforming its Victorian proscenium stage into a raked-seating theatre in the round. If entering the auditorium resembles walking around the hoardings of a building site, the performance space itself does, at times, have something magical about it. Much of this is down to Bruno Poet’s lighting effects, designed around gently glowing balls of light and glitterballs whose sparkle across the audience cleverly draws it into the onstage romance.

Writing team Abner and Amanda Ramirez, with help from music theatre veteran Jeremy Sams, have produced a script that is often very funny and points up the passing years with neat references (mobile phones, hummus). If some scenes feel disconnected, it’s a failing that follows from the book’s original structure and an inability in this format to flesh out Dex and Em’s wider network of relationships beyond sketchy vignettes. The first half of the show veers uneasily from set piece numbers to something more through-composed, like a Sondheim show or Once (with which One Day shares some similarities). In the first half, it’s more often the spoken dialogue that brings the story’s emotions into focus than the songs. After the break and a beautifully conceived scene in a maze (story, character and choreography at last as one), the music finds its feet, and the duet “You” proves a heart-stopping highlight.

But while the set creates an intimate setting for performers, audience, and music-making, the creative team has unbalanced the production dangerously with an overload of props, people, and a desire for energetic movement that the space can’t comfortably contain. The result is unavoidable clutter. Furniture is imported for just a few sentences of sung dialogue, groups of dancers emoting around what might otherwise be scenes of poignant intensity, and the whole supporting cast required to jump out of their recognisable characters into frankly awkward music and movement routines. Emma and Ian’s date night, as a distraught Dex attempts to reach her by phone (no mobiles at this point), is sabotaged by surreal choreography built around a telephone cable and a stage revolve. It’s as if two different shows have collided in front of us, and the result isn’t pretty.

Director Max Webster and choreographer Carrie-Anne Ingrouille come to One Day with impressive West End credentials, and there’s much to admire in the theatrical flamboyance they bring to this production, but on this occasion they’ve attempted to inflate a storyline into something bigger than it can possibly sustain. We can thank their lead players that David Nicholl’s take on the last decade of the twentieth century, and those who experienced it, still has the power to charm and emerges on the Lyceum stage to live another day.