Romantics Anonymous, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, review: Emma Rice's big-hearted swansong

Rice leaves Shakespeare's Globe as its artistic director on a good note with a musical adaptation of the 2010 French-Belgian rom-com film ‘Les emotifs anonymes’

Carly Bawden as Angélique in 'Romantics Anonymous' at Shakespeare's Globe

After her bumpy ride with the board of Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice bows out as artistic director with this toothsome treat which launches her last winter season of work programmed for the venue’s jewel box of an indoor theatre.

Romantics Anonymous is the first musical to be staged here and it proves to be a gracious, big-hearted swansong – an intimate, delectably joyous mix of the silly and the stirring that makes a point about the need to break moulds but leaves not the slightest aftertaste of personal bitterness or rancour.

Rice has always stuck up for misfits and oddballs, as demonstrated by the “Club of the Unloved”, the anorak-twitching chorus in her superb version of Tristan & Yseult. She’s also shown a partiality for French cinema (think of her theatrical take, with Kneehigh, on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).

These penchants flow together now in Romantics Anonymous, a musical adaptation of the 2010 French-Belgian rom-com film Les emotifs anonymes about two cripplingly shy chocolate-makers who meet with matching inhibitions and fall in love.

Angelique is a young woman who creates beautiful chocolates but works undercover for a kindly commercial mentor because her anxiety levels are so high that she even faints when people look at her at the eponymous support group for the chronically timid that she attends. Similarly afflicted, Jean-Rene is the owner of an ailing chocolate factory who spends his time shut away listening to irritating self-help tapes and chatting to the deceased father who drummed into his son the defeatist risk-averse philosophy (“Life is best lived, I have found, safe on the ground”) that has left Jean-Rene close to bankruptcy emotionally and professionally. When Angelique is forced to seek a job with his firm, will she be able to bring herself, however indirectly, to provide the recipe for a much-needed break with stagnant tradition?

​Carly Bawden and Dominic Marsh are irresistibly charming and awkward as this socially challenged couple. The human scale of this chamber piece and its dramatic journey (two outsiders who have to overcome temperamental inhibitions before they melt as the soulmates they are) remind you, at times, of She Loves Me. It would be misleading to suggest that the show is in the league of that Harnick and Bock masterpiece. Christopher Dimond’s lyrics gesture towards a wit they rarely pin down with enough precision but there’s an attractive Gallic whimsy to Michael Kooman’s undulating score (played by a spot-on four-piece band) and the gawky warmth and sincerity of the lead performances convince you that song is the perfect private safety-valve for cranky, uptight loners.

Rice’s prowess at ensemble story-telling is enchantingly exemplified by her delightful multi-tasking cast in their berets and Breton tops who double as factory workers, waiters, and support group eccentrics. It’s a deluxe company, with the great Joanna Riding making a strong-voiced impact in a tangy trio of roles that include a hair-netted Corrie-style workforce chief who cogs on to Angelique’s secret and takes the wheel for the daft car-chase that is one of the gems of Etta-Murfitt’s appealingly scaled-down choreography.

The show is suffused with a lovely, unpretentious sense of humour. It’s a great joke that Angelique recruits the painfully unintelligible mumbler from her timids’ anonymous group to feign it as the reclusive chocolate-making genius whom she pretends to have found. And a bright idea to have Philip Cox’s excellent, killjoy father wander through the audience during the interval singing of all the risks we take in theatre-going: “But we can do nothing/ It’s too late to go/ Since we can’t do anything, let’s go back to the show.”

Not that punters will need much persuasion here. It’s typical of Rice’s generosity as a theatre-maker that she signs off as Globe supremo with a production that ends in the elating spectacle (very her, very Chagall, very unrepining) of lovers ditching wedding-ceremony convention and dancing on air.

‘Romantics Anonymous’, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, runs until 6 January 2018 (www.shakespearesglobe.com)