Once review – slick romance skips showstoppers and defies razzmatazz

This stripped-down show with a maudlin set of songs makes for the most reluctant of musicals, but this is a production that has the confidence to be silent or stately

When Once opened on Broadway in 2012, later to enjoy a run in London’s West End, it was greeted with a degree of surprise. You can see why. In terms of the Great White Way, it is an anti-musical.

Based on the 2007 film by John Carney, with a book by Enda Walsh and songs by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, it is unusual not just in being given a stripped-down production by John Tiffany on a barroom set by Bob Crowley that is all scuffed mirrors, wooden panelling and gloomy corners. And not just in its folksy atmosphere, with its preshow singalong and an ensemble of actor-musicians who muck in without fanfare.

But unusual also in fielding such a maudlin set of songs and a depressive story, written on the wind, that defies razzmatazz. More than once it threatens to erupt into a rousing showstopper and more than once it resists. Even the movement sequences by Steven Hoggett owe everything to the angularity of physical theatre and nothing to the high-kicking spirit of A Chorus Line. It is the most reluctant of musicals.

On the one hand, this makes it a low-key pleasure, a show that welcomes you in, instead of cajoling. Tiffany’s remount brings back the original creative team to open Alan Cumming’s debut season as Pitlochry’s artistic director. It has a pleasing slickness and economy of means. The music is rhythmically complex and sensitively arranged by Martin Lowe, and the acoustic songs bubble up organically. The production has the confidence to be silent or stately.

On the other hand, the story is short on peaks of passion. A lovelorn Dublin busker (Dylan Wood) is dragged out of disillusionment by a brusque young woman from the Czech Republic (Lydia White), also at a romantic crossroads, but only enough to make him pick up his guitar again and nearly, but not quite, strike up a relationship with her.

With so little at stake and the mood so morose, his minor change of fortune makes you less elated than relieved. The bittersweet ending is emotionally true, even if this brooding show is an autumnal way to kick off a summer season.

• At Pitlochry festival theatre until 27 June