Heart of Winter – Live at Zédel

Heart of Winter at Live at Zédel, London. The show will have another performance on 15 May 2018.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A one-woman, one-act, sung-through musical about a woman who, after having her heart broken, attempts to find love again? So far, so Tell Me On a Sunday.

But while the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Don Black musical sees its heroine jet off to America for misadventures, Heart of Winter stays resolutely more rooted in English domesticity and is all the more believable for that.

The musical’s sole character, Kate, played in two performances atLive at Zédel by Olivier winner Rebecca Trehearn, is a primary school teacher in the North of England. Emotionally, there may be no dependency on such geographical specificity – Kate’s story will ring true to anyone whose relationship has failed. But Tim Connor’s lyric structures mimics regional speech patterns in ways that seem to demand an appropriate accent.

There may not be many rhymes that demand Northern pronunciation, an exception being the rhyming of “class” with “lass” in ‘The Driving Lesson’ – and of course Kate’s description of herself as a “lass” in the first place – but it is refreshing to hear a musical which doesn’t demand a transatlantic accent from its singer.

That sense of place extends to the locale for each of Connor’s songs, and their place within Kate’s story (which has been developed by the piece’s dramaturg, Lia Buddle). The sense of being emotionally at sea on her best friend’s sofa, of having to return to work and pretend that everything is fine while one’s head is silently screaming the opposite, is both honest and disarmingly charming.

Indeed, that workplace number (‘Back to School’), detailing as it does the pressures of dealing with a barrage of small children, has the hallmarks of becoming a cabaret comedy standard. The humour and multiple characters bring a very modern ethos to Joyce Grenfell’s classic ‘George, Don’t Do That’ monologues – and compared against that high standard, Connor’s work holds up.

Elsewhere, Connor demonstrates a fine grasp of the sadness of a terminated relationship, as in ‘Something About the Room’ when household objects previously imbued with shared memories get segregated ‘his’ and ‘hers’.

But Heart of Winter does not let itself dwell on such matters. Indeed, with a running time of just over half an hour, there is not much time to dwell on anything at all. Kate’s redemptive path, as effortlessly performed by Trehearn, goes from trying a rebound relationship to finding redemption in one’s own self-belief in record time.

And while there is something hugely refreshing in a musical that doesn’t contain a single minute of filler, it is also Heart of Winter’s biggest disappointment. For this song cycle is so enjoyable, so full of charm, that one wants to spend longer in its company.

Scott Matthewman