Flowers For Mrs Harris – Chichester Festival Theatre website

Mark Meadows and Clare Burt in Chichester Festival Theatre’s Flowers For Mrs Harris. Picture: Johan Persson

Flowers For Mrs Harris is free to watch on the Chichester Festival Theatre website until 8 May 2020.

There’s been precious little feelgood factor about this past miserable month but Chichester Festival Theatre is doing its bit to spread sunshine into our shrivelling lives by offering their charming 2018 production of Flowers For Mrs Harris free to view – and there’s still plenty of time to see it.

It’s the heartwarming post-war tale of a long-widowed, middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth London char who has done nothing with her life but dust, polish and clean for other people until she falls in love with a Christian Dior dress glimpsed in the home of a rich employer and uses a win on the football pools to go to Paris and buy one for herself.

The win doesn’t cover the trip but with a bit of help she raises the rest, even when the dress price goes up as the exchange rate changes – the Dior showroom in Paris pulls out all the stops to custom-fit her in record time as she has no money to stay longer – there’s a unlikely twist which I won’t spoil – and if you are not damp-eyed at the end, the chances are you’re not human.

Clare Burt is totally loveable as widow Ada Harris, her early scenes with fellow skivvy Claire Machin a joy, and various cameos, notably by Joanna Riding and Gary Wilmot in double roles, are bang on the money in Daniel Evans’ gentle production based on a Paul Gallico novella.

It’s very slight and Richard Taylor’s songs are nothing special but it works. Sadly it never made it to London but the Guardian critic gave it five stars, calling it “one of the most heartwarming British musicals of recent years” and it’s a little gem. I may even have to see it again once my hankies come out of the wash.

Also well worth checking out is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Shows Must Go On free channel where the Australian production of Love Never Dies with Ben Lewis and Anna O’Byrne, widely regarded as superior to the much-changed, much-derided version London saw, holds centre-stage for 48 hours this weekend, continuing The Phantom of the Opera saga we lapped up last week.

With no live theatre until September at the earliest, plenty of time for the noble lord to give us some turkeys that maybe didn’t deserve their necks wringing – By Jeeves, The Beautiful Game and the underrated Stephen Ward (bad title that meant nothing to the under-40s but an entertaining spin on the infamous Profumo scandal that rocked the 60s and one great song ‘I’m Hopeless When It Comes To You’).

And another look at Song And Dance and/or its lovely little half-sister Tell Me On A Sunday would be much appreciated too, m’lud.

Jeremy Chapman