A flop: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal to capture the outstanding qualities of this unique show.

The year is 1918 and a miraculous birth occurs in a remote Cornish fishing village. The newborn is not a baby but an adult pensioner, Benjamin, who emerges from the womb wearing a three-piece suit, a pair of spectacles and a bowler hat. His shame-faced mother hastens away from the family home and takes a walk along the cliffs, which results in her death. Suicide, perhaps. And Benjamin’s angry father locks him in the attic and refuses to let him out. Benjamin escapes and visits the local pub where he enjoys a single pint of ale every Friday night for the next four years.

Benjamin’s handicap makes his life easier as time passes. For a dramatist, that’s unhelpful

It transpires that Benjamin is doomed to live his life in reverse, growing younger while those around him age. And for some reason, his father conceals this awkward fact from the rest of the village. Only the midwife knows the truth but she fails to share the information with her hot-headed daughter who works in the pub and adores older men. She and Benjamin start a romance but even then the midwife says nothing about Benjamin’s condition. The story is full of puzzles and difficulties like this.

Benjamin’s handicap makes his life easier as time passes and the pressure on him relaxes rather than intensifying. For a dramatist, that’s unhelpful. To solve this problem the writer, Jethro Compton, throws in a lot of external shocks: mysterious illnesses, unexplained drownings, the outbreak of war in 1939, the D-Day landings and so on.