Starter for Ten – Bristol Old Vic

Picture: Marc Brenner

Starter for Ten continues at Bristol Old Vic until 30 March 2024.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Bristol University graduate David Nicholls is something of a Renaissance man at present. His novel One Day, written as long ago as 2009, is currently the hit of the Netflix television season, while his new novel You Are Here is on the way shortly. Now his very first literary venture Starter for Ten, published in 2003 and rapidly adapted as a film starring James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch, is being given its world premiere as a musical by the Bristol Old Vic, in partnership with Antic Productions, Longshot Films and Playtone.

The show is set in Nicholls’ alma mater in the 1980s and is built around the coming-of-age of working-class first-year student Brian Jackson, lent just the right level of scruffy insecurity by Adam Bregman, who seeks to find his feet by joining Bristol’s University Challenge team. This proves to be the catalyst for first love with Sloane Ranger Alice (Emily Lane) and roller-coaster friendship with feisty student protester Rebecca (Eubha Akilade).

The book (also lyrics) by Emma Hall and Charlie Parham, who also directs, is littered with student comedy and nostalgia, frequently laced with the television programme’s mix of intellectual and left-field questions. It brings on board the spitting image of University Challenge iconic quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne, played with great aplomb by Robert Portal, even testing the audience’s general knowledge on one occasion.

Brian’s family life and anxieties, strong features of the original novel, are also presented full on, with Mel Giedroyc doubling as his worried but proud Essex mother and a hilariously bossy Margaret Thatcher look-alike television studio boss, who has one of the show’s best songs in ‘Cream of the Crop’. A further Nicholls theme is the power of education, capably portrayed by Gemma Knight Jones’ Professor of English, and the only disappointment is that the impact of Brian and his team’s eventual downfall in the original novel is very much downplayed here in favour of one of those all-singing, all-dancing endings so beloved of musicals.

All this is set to a pounding score with additional lyrics by Hatty Carman and Tom Rasmussen – virtually sung-through – which even manages to squeeze questions on such unlikely subjects as the Battle of the Bulge and Dante’s Inferno into the musical numbers. Each one is staged with captivating intensity by director Parham and choreographer Shelley Maxwell, backed in the best post-punk style by musical director Ellie Verkerk and six onstage musicians.

This is a high-powered bid to give the Nicholls novel fresh momentum as a musical, reflecting the original renaming of Starter for Ten as ‘A Question of Attraction’ for publication in America, where University Challenge was unknown.

Jeremy Brien