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Playwright David Greig and director Max Webster are not afraid of a theatrical challenge. The last show they worked on together – The Lorax at London’s Old Vic in 2015 – transformed a complicated Dr Seuss story about capitalism, global heating and a grumpy forest guardian into a bright and breezy family show. Greig has tackled mammoth musicals (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and mountainside thrillers (Touching the Void), while Webster’s biggest hit, The Life of Pi, conjured up floating tigers and raging storms with theatrical flair and swagger.
Now the two are collaborating on a staged musical of David Nicholls’s much-loved – and much-adapted – novel One Day, first published in 2009. That might sound like a relatively straightforward theatrical challenge but there are pitfalls aplenty when it comes to staging the near-iconic love story, which follows would-be couple Dex and Em’s relationship over the same day – 15 July – across two decades. A case in point: the fairly disastrous 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway.
While the film may act as a warning to would-be adaptors, the huge popularity of the Netflix series in 2024, starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall, presents its own challenges. Can there be such a thing as too much One Day? And can the beautifully low-key yet devastating romance of the TV series really be bettered? The creative team behind the musical don’t seem too concerned. “The Netflix adaptation doesn’t affect us,” insists a softly spoken Greig. “It’s such a different process for us. It’s like we’re making a butter sculpture of One Day. We’re just in a different field.”
When we meet in a cafe just before Christmas, with festive love songs blaring over the speakers, the creative team are six weeks into rehearsals. A complete first draft of Greig’s script is nearly in sight, the songs – composed by the US husband-and-wife pop duo Abner and Amanda Ramirez, AKA Johnnyswim – are still being written, and choreographer Carrie-Anne Ingrouille is only in the very early stages of bringing Dex and Em’s love story kicking into life.
Greig and Webster have been working on the production, which will be staged at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum theatre, for just over a year. While that’s really quite quick for a large-scale musical, the process has presented a number of theatrical conundrums: from how to cram a 20-year love affair into just two hours to how to conjure up a show that has enough theatrical heft from a tale that is all about the little moments in life and the tiny coincidences that can make or break a relationship.
Webster seems almost giddy when he points out the myriad of challenges he faces: “What’s it like to change and grow over 20 years? How do you express that through words and music? But also how do you reflect on British history over 20 years? Nicholls’s novel is about two individuals’ lives but it’s also about the texture of life; the stuff – the brands, culture and weird social quirks – we grew up with.”
One of the ways the team plan to ground their adaptation and create ample emotional impact is through song. It helps, says Greig, that Abner and Amanda Ramirez are enthusiasts of Nicholls’s novel: “They’ve got a borderline obsession with One Day. I think there’s something brilliant and miraculous about the fact that David Nicholls has written this very specific play about suburban middle-class Britain and yet Abner and Amanda, who met in Nashville, find it completely them. And hundreds, thousands, millions of people around the world think the same thing when they read the novel: ‘It’s me, it’s me, it’s me!’”
Abner and Amanda’s backstory could have been written by Nicholls himself. The two first met after a church service in Nashville in 2001 but only really got to know each other at a songwriting session four years later. They’ve been creating music together ever since, as well as podcasts, cooking shows and countless other creative ventures – plus three small children. Everything they dream up together draws on their own life experiences and their songs, which are a blend of pop, folk and country, are sensitively observed and deeply personal compositions.
The songs will be performed by experienced musical stars Jamie Muscato (Dex) and Sharon Rose (Em), both of whom, enthuses Webster, “provide truthful acting and virtuosic singing by the bucket load”. The music will hopefully elevate the novel’s small but critical moments – the fractious dinners, forgotten letters and stolen kisses – and make them powerful enough for the theatre. “The book is made up of so many intricate moments but song can take those moments and fill the theatre with emotion,” says Webster. “A moment that may sound quite small, when told as an anecdote, can still feel huge. If a person isn’t nice to you over dinner that might seem like a small story but, actually, the feeling you have inside as you walk home that night fills up the whole evening sky. Song can do that.”
Ironically, there is something about the ordinariness of Nicholls’s novel – the low-key nature of Em and Dex’s timeless love affair – that seems to make it so special. It is a quality that Webster is keen to reflect in his production: “What we’re saying, in the end, is that it’s worth looking at everyday lives because they are in some ways extraordinary. Em and Dex aren’t world-beating heroes. But one thing that is so brilliant about the book is that it says what we do with those ordinary lives is as important as any kind of huge heroics.”
Then there is the intimacy of the novel, the feeling that the book is speaking to you and only you, how do the team intend to recreate that? “We’re boarding over the Lyceum completely and making it as a round,” explains Webster with gusto. “The show will start and end at the Pear Tree pub in Edinburgh, where Em and Dex first meet on graduation night. The audience will be very close to us, with cabaret-style tables and chairs round the stage. So you’re really able to be in the room with Em and Dex as they share their days together.”
The musical is premiering in Edinburgh for a reason: this is where Em and Dex’s story begins. Greig, who recently stepped down as artistic director of the Royal Lyceum, believes it’s the perfect place to begin this next chapter in Nicholls’s enduringly popular story: “Whenever you work on a musical, part of that creative process is the first moment of discovery in front of the audience – and I think the Edinburgh audience is going to be perfect. Perhaps a bit cheekily, they now think they own the story of One Day.”
The decision to stage the show in Edinburgh is also a practical one, says Webster: “I think it’s really important that there are partnerships between subsidised and commercial work and that one of the models – as the government starts to cut the Arts Council funding – is that those collaborations work both ways. So I think that the craftspeople in Edinburgh – the costume, dramaturgy and producing departments at the Lyceum – are an amazing resource to the commercial team. And, of course, the commercial enhancement is amazing for an Arts Council-funded building. It’s all creating a synergy that is really important going forward.”
Webster and Greig hope they are creating a show that theatre aficionados and One Day enthusiasts will love and admire. But they’re really staging this show for the Ems and Dexes out there, the unsung heroes “going about their normal lives, who want a really wonderful night out”. Greig is also writing with one specific person in mind: his wife. In one of life’s lovely little coincidences, the two first met in the year Nicholls’s novel begins.
“Lucie and I got together in 1988. We went through the whole world of the novel together. She doesn’t really like theatre much,” Greig adds with a wry chuckle. “But that means that when she does like it I’m really happy. So this one is for Lucie and her female friends. I think they’re going to like it. I’m going to be so pissed off if they don’t.”
One Day: The Musical is at the Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, 27 February to 19 April.
