“The Hired Man” – re-hired

Amy Nuttall as feisty Emily in 'The Hired Man'

It could be that Howard Goodall will never write another piece as good as The Hired Man but I for one hope that he will keep trying. His Cumbian musical (book Melvyn Bragg) is without question one of the great British models of the genre. I saw it at its first London outing (at the now defunct Astoria, Charing Cross Road) and have continued to seek it out whenever and wherever revivals surface. The latest at Clapham’s intimate and ever-enterprising Landor Theatre, where I caught the final performance last night, reinforced my love of it, my admiration for it. Earthy in feeling and look with bails of hay trailing debris to and from the performance space and sepia-like tableaux frozen or semi-frozen like memories, Andrew Keates’ fluid staging gave the piece a wonderful immediacy.

Ask me why this piece is so important in the chronicle of British musicals and the answer is simple and unequivocal: this is a piece where the musical language (and though I applaud the directness of the book and lyrics, it is Goodall’s score that gives it its very particular tinta) is inseparable from the vernacular of the setting and subject and characters. Its muscularity springs from “the land”, if you like, from the rough spontaneity of regional folk music and its form (taut and cogent) from the great English choral tradition. What makes it so eminently performable – in amateur and professional circles alike – is that the songs rely so totally on honesty. Goodall’s rangy vocal lines make it impossible to over-beautify them – they have to be sung on the feeling and the emotion; their rawness and awkwardness precludes “singerly” mannerisms.

The Landor cast shirked nothing – their engagement and big-heartedness drew you in. And, yes, as all the key melodic strands coalesced into the thrilling four or five-part counterpoint of the final tableau it got to me all over again. In a business so full of “generic” musicals with no clear voice of their own, The Hired Man is one of the shining exceptions. Funnily enough the Landor is about to do another: Flaherty and Ahrens Ragtime.

Recent Posts on Arts - News, notes and quotes on the Arts world -

• Heidi: I don't want my night to ever fizzle off, I want to finish it with an explosion
• Becoming Damien Hirst? You're not the first
• The Photography Blog: Rise of the smartphone, but smart photography too?
• Lung: I thought they wanted a chat…but they offered me a record deal
• Edward Norton: I wrote Wes a letter about Rushmore and that’s how we met