The Time Traveller’s Wife, Apollo Theatre review: The story hasn’t aged well – but this’ll have you weeping

When Audrey Niffenegger’s international bestselling novel The Time Traveller’s Wife was published in 2003, it was a more innocent time. #MeToo hadn’t exposed a dark underbelly of sordid secrets and readers worldwide were swept away by a dreamy love story about a couple struggling to stay in the same year as each other.

Two decades on, and this series of meetings, sometimes between a grown man and a young girl, looks far less easily palatable. Such is the challenge that this new musical, with music and lyrics by Joss Stone and Dave Stewart, formerly of Eurythmics, knows that it must confront.

Film and television iterations of Niffenegger’s novel have struggled and, for much of the first half, it looks as though this show will too. Lauren Gunderson’s script is over-emphatic and Clare (Joanna Woodward) is such an insanely perky young woman that we feel we, too, might take our chances in the space-time continuum so as to avoid spending too long with her.

Henry (David Hunter) is an affably bemused librarian with a genetic disorder that enables him to travel backwards and forwards within his own life span. The big trouble is that the “rules” governing this time travel are never adequately explained; Henry’s trips back to see the mother who died when he was six are comprehensible (the plaintive number “I See Her” is full of understandable anguish), but why the visits to the child Clare? We don’t want to think the worst – and that’s not at all what Niffenegger suggests – but without any clarification it remains awkwardly jarring.

Clare’s life progresses in regular chronological style and Bill Buckhurst’s production takes a marked turn for the better when she is anchored in adulthood, meaning she and Henry get married. His lengthy absences weigh upon her, giving rise to the furious ballad “I’m in Control”.

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Woodward convincingly shows a woman struggling to ascertain how much agency she truly has in the matter of so-called “life choices”. After a choppy start, she and Hunter make for an appealing pairing, convincing us absolutely of Clare and Henry’s troubled but enduring love.

The evening is at its best when it’s at its simplest; all sci-fi shenanigans aside, the moral is to make the most of time, as we never know how much we have left.

Eventually a snuffly sort of silence came over the theatre, as audience members wept gently, remembering lost loved ones of all kinds. This is the show’s real power source, rather than songs with often bland lyrics by big-name stars.

To 30 March (0330 333 4809, timetravellerswife.com)