The Time Traveller’s Wife review: A gentle new British musical brimming with weirdness

Love (and being in a different century) threatens to tear the heroes apart in this sweet but surface-level show, adapted from Audrey Niffenegger’s book with songs by Joss Stone and Dave Stewart

The company of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ (Photos by Johan Persson)

Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife is a box of nightmares wrapped up in loving ruffles of romance. This unsettling, gently sci-fi love story has got under the skin of thousands of readers, spawned two screen adaptations, and now it’s the latest new British musical to take a crack at the West End. It’s a slick creation, with songs by Eurythmics musician Dave Stewart and singer-songwriter Joss Stone, but its breathless pace can’t hide its underlying weirdness.

Its romantic hero Henry isn’t the fun, Doctor Who type of time traveller, the kind able to pop back to Tudor times for a quick hog roast, forward a few millennia to hobnob with some silvery aliens, then back home for tea. Instead, he’s condemned to pick a jumbled path through his own timeline, ricocheting against his will between his older and younger selves – and leaving his poor wife Clare forever waiting; longing for answers she’ll never fully get from him.

David Hunter and Joanna Woodward make a clean-cut, fine-voiced central pairing, but they’re not really given space to fully explore the emotional impact of being trapped in a marriage where nothing is certain, not even being in the same time period for their wedding day. Not to mention the oddness of a relationship that begins with Henry popping up naked and covered in blood in a field outside the 11-year-old Clare’s house, his role eventually shifting from kindly mentor to dashing boyfriend.

Niffenegger’s book is the lightest kind of sci-fi, not especially interested in the practical implications of time travel and the butterfly effect (Henry snags a winning lottery ticket with no perceptible damage to the structural integrity of the universe). This musical is still lighter, barely even attempting to explain why Henry’s mysterious genetic condition makes him flit through decades. Still, there’s something undeniably impressive about the way that playwright Lauren Gunderson’s book combines with Bill Buckhurst’s nimble direction to turn a complex novel into a neatly paced, always compelling musical. There’s a lot of plot here and she handles it deftly, showing Clare raging as she realises Henry has disappeared before she can get the last word in an argument, or battling him for the child she longs for.

Joanna Woodward as Clare and David Hunter as Henry (Johan Persson)

Stone and Stewart’s songs slot neatly into this detailed story. They’re mostly piano and strings-driven, drawing from a more conventional musical palette than you might expect from this pair of composers (if only we got some Eurythmics-style punch and darkness) but there’s still a compelling yearning quality to songs, such as Henry’s lament-like “Journeyman” and Clare’s outpouring in “Masterpiece”. Their friends Charisse and Gomez provide some welcome light relief, with Hiba Elchikhe and Tim Mahendran bouncing hilariously off each other and supplying a tough funk number that injects some much-needed sonic muscle into the second act.

Stage magician Chris Fisher’s illusions might be hit and miss: at one point Henry is literally pulled through the fabric of time while clumsily hidden by a blanket. Still, there remains plenty of real magic here. The Time Traveller’s Wife doesn’t dig into the emotional pain or logistical details of its scenario, but it sparks with moments of emotional intensity, capturing the random cruelties of a universe that brings lovers together, then does all it can to tear them apart.

Apollo Theatre, until 30 March, 2024