There's been much hand-wringing about where the next generation of British musicals is to come from. The Arts Council is so concerned about the glut of American shows that it has commissioned an inquiry to determine how fresh blood may be injected into a West End whose arteries have been hardened by years of glutinous Broadway product.
It frequently goes unobserved that Howard Goodall has been plugging away for the past 20 years, quietly devising a distinctive form of musical theatre embedded in the choral and folk traditions of the English countryside. The Hired Man is adapted from Melvyn Bragg's 1984 novel. Yet it is a measure of how undervalued Goodall's work seems to be that it has never been presented in a touring version until now.
Set in the opening decades of the 20th century, the novel was written as a tribute to Bragg's grandfather, a farm labourer and keen amateur musician. Like all his fiction, it is infused with the physical and emotional landscape of Cumbria. The story revolves around the seasonal lottery of hiring fairs, where an increasingly hungry population of agricultural workers apply for a dwindling pool of jobs. The action covers a vast amount of ground, from the outbreak of war to the development of the Labour movement; though East Midlands rural touring company New Perspectives has successfully condensed this epic tale of the changing countryside into a chamber musical appropriate for a circuit of village halls. Daniel Buckroyd's production features a versatile ensemble of actor-musicians and Juliet Shillingford's simple set resourcefully suggests misty fells, precarious mine shafts and the shattered fields of France.
It's a pleasure to hear a musical heartily sung without amplification: musical director Richard Reeday pounds away at a piano rather unconvincingly disguised as a rock; and if some of the playing is scratchy, it hardly matters, as Goodall's score is rooted in the simple cadences of village choirs and fireside music-making.
Twenty years on, the Hired Man still offers a wholemeal alternative to sugary musicals and presents a lesson in how to produce an authentically English strain of music theatre, with a harmonic language closer to Delius or Vaughan Williams than Disney and Lloyd Webber. It will never conquer Broadway of course: but perhaps that's no bad thing.
· Until September 29. Box office: 0115-846 7777. Then touring.
