Pictures: Roy Tan
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button continues at the Ambassadors Theatre, London until 15 February 2025.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button arrives in the West End as a cacophony of music and movement. Although it’s not groundbreaking, it’s a lively and vibrant show.
The musical by Jethro Compton (book, lyrics, also director/designer) and Darren Clark (music, lyrics) takes its concept from F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story about an old man born at 70 who ages in reverse. It’s now a well-known story, largely thanks to a 2008 film adaptation starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Now, the story’s setting has been transferred to the Cornish coast by Compton, complete with the creak of timber and a West Country twang.
The fast-paced narrative and actor-musician chorus (complete with rustic, coastal orchestrations from Clark and Mark Aspinall) is satisfying and striking at times – particularly when we’re whisked into fiery jaunts in a Cornish pub. However, it does feel somewhat over-relied on. As the musical flashes from one energetic number to the next, contrast feels lacking.
The new Cornish setting is effective and alluring. Practically, it allows for a satisfying musical genre of folk tune and sea shanty, which Clark evokes nicely with the accordion and tin whistle. Metaphorically, it enables the musical’s central theme – time – to be told not with the ticking of a clock but with the passing of sand through an hourglass and the rising and falling of the tide.
The focus on time can also feel overused at times though. You can hardly escape a scene that narrates events through the passage of time, with years, hours, minutes and seconds spewed out so frequently that it becomes repetitive and burdensome.
The cast is an impressive and tireless collective of actor-musicians. Cleverly comprised, with each actor juggling multiple characters and sometimes multiple instruments, they are a collective body that shine together, to great effect.
John Dagleish is marvellous as the eponymous Benjamin Button. The constant in the chorus of changing characters, he is playful and dynamic, with an impressive vocal register. He uses physicality rather than prosthetics to demonstrate his curious de-aging, and it works excellently. He brilliantly espouses the vitality and joy of the play as a whole.
Benjamin’s love interest Elowen is skilfully played by Clare Foster. She too inhabits a multitude of ages through the musical, and does so very convincingly. She also brings some of the musical’s much-needed softer moments.
Benjamin’s curiosities aside, the narrative is pretty standard. A love-at-first-sight pair falls in and out of each other’s lives searching for happiness and belonging, learning ultimately that they find it best with each other. Still, it’s a boisterous and cheerful production that’s undeniably good fun.
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