Travels through time

At the end of September, Storyhouse in Chester, a venue which – appropriately enough combines a theatre and cinema with a library—will play host to a new musical based on Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 international smash The Time Traveller’s Wife with music and lyrics by British singer-songwriter Joss Stone and the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart.

Initially announced early in 2021, it will be produced by Colin Ingram who also produced the musicals "Back to The Future" and "Ghost" (Stewart also wrote the music and lyrics for the latter) and this Chester run will likely pave the way to a West End transfer. It’s what, in the US, they call an out-of-town try-out, a way of testing the waters in front of smaller audiences.

Niffenegger’s book, which was a phenomenal success, selling in its millions, straddles both science fiction and romance. It tells the story of Henry, a librarian with a genetic condition that means he can travel through time though he has no control over where and when he goes and always arrives in a new time dazed and completely naked. His unpredictable time-hopping results in him being absent from his wife Clare’s life for long periods, disappearing at crucial moments, including their wedding.

Its high concept, genre-hopping quality makes it a challenging book to adapt. That’s not put anyone off trying, however, and it has been adapted for HBO—by "Doctor Who" showrunner Stephen Moffat, no stranger to "timey-wimey stuff"— and for film, in a duff 2009 production in which Eric Bana played Henry and Rachel McAdams played Clare, but neither has had quite the same cultural impact as the novel. It’s a complex story with which to wrestle, containing quite a bit of what Lucy Mangan, in her Guardian review of the TV adaptation, referred to as “ick factor". Musical theatre is, however, a heightened art form – perhaps it will be able to capture the book’s mixture of bleak marriage metaphor, overtly fantastical premise and the, for want of a better term, "ick"?

In the book Clare and Henry encounter one another at different points in each other’s timelines. Clare initially meets him when she is a child and he is much older. Despite this she is fairly confident she will one day be his wife. You might think this dynamic would prove problematic to set to song but then you remember Andrew Lloyd Webber based a musical on Aspects of Love, Bloomsbury hanger-on David Garnett’s novella about his fixation with a young girl who he sets his heart on marrying (based on his own questionable relationship with the daughter of his former lover, the artist Duncan Grant). 

It wouldn’t be the first surprising title to provide inspiration to musical theatre writers. Over the years there have been musical versions of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (Duncan Sheik supplied the music and lyrics while Matt Smith starred as Patrick Bateman in the London production), Kazuo Ishiguro’s portrait of English emotional restraint The Remains of the Day, and Robert James Waller’s slender in more ways than one The Bridges of Madison County. It was her turn as Celie in the musical version of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning The Colour Purple—a novel that doesn’t immediately make your mind go to showtunes—that helped propel Broadway star Cynthia Erivo to fame. The musical was revived last year by Leicester Curve, in a production directed by Nikolai Foster.

Even the most unlikely source novel can become a candidate for musical treatment. The musical version of Stephen King’s Carrie was a notorious Broadway flop, closing after only a handful of performances, but it has developed a large fan base and later revivals in the UK and US have allowed people to reassess it. A new musical based on Jack Engelhard’s 1980s novel Indecent Proposal, which inspired the Robert Redford film, opened at Southwark Playhouse last year, is unlikely to have a similar fate with the reviews suggesting that even the addition of songs couldn’t salvage this dated premise.

The Time Traveller’s Wife may well have an ace up its sleeve in its book writer (the person responsible for the dialogue not the songs). Stone and Stewart are working with the American playwright Lauren Gunderson, whose two-hander "I and You" is one of the most produced plays in the US. It’s a sweet story about two teens, one isolated from the outside world by a medical condition, which has a kicker of a supernatural twist. So she seems a good candidate to find a workable dramatic form for this genre-fluid novel, though it’ll be interesting to see whether she can also find a way to navigate the inherent imbalance in the couple’s relationship or the rather dark ending.

The Time Traveller’s Wife is at Storyhouse, Chester, from 30th September to 15th October.