THE MUSICALS THAT MADE ME #2 - Les Misérables

“My place is here” — on belonging and belief

If you map London’s theatre district, Theatreland, from the Dominion Theatre at its northernmost point, down to the Trafalgar in the southern, with the Aldwych in the east and the Palladium in the west, at the heart, at the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, sits the Palace Theatre.

For 18 years, Les Misérables occupied that architectural palace of varieties. From that origin, Les Misérables became the heart of the West End, the moral compass of society and the centre of my universe.

Stop.

Click.

Rewind.

It’s my 12th birthday. I open presents over a bowl of Kelloggs Corn Flakes in our sitting room in Willesden Green. It’s a few days before Christmas and my birthday always feels like an inconvenience, something to be got out of the way before the main event. There are books (there are always books for me), perhaps a jumper, I don’t recall. One gift stands out. A small plastic box. A cassette.

It is 1985 and my world is shifting. Since I was born we have moved house five times. I feel unsettled and lonely. This year I started at secondary school. It’s a three-hour round trip to school and I have not made friends there, nor have I made friends in our new home in Willesden. My sister is talking about moving out to go to college and my brother is a teenager who wants nothing to do with me.

I take the tape to my bedroom to unwrap.

First Night Records. The original London cast recording of a new musical, Les Misérables, that has just been released. I read the inlay card carefully, the song list, cast list, a brief description of the show. I take my Samsung cassette player and sit on the bed. I remove the tape from its case and slot it into the cassette desk, turn the volume up and press down hard on the Play button.

The opening of a musical is a promise to the audience. It outlines the world and its morals, it teaches us how to listen, how to feel. With Oklahoma that is the promise of a new day, Oh, What A Beautiful Morning, with Fiddler on the Roof, the structure of community, with The Lion King an ancient ritual.

Les Misérables begins with a moan. It is dark, guttural, animalistic. It arrives with strain, with labour, It is like no musical I have heard before. It begins in the gutter and stays there. It begins with men.

At 12 years old, musicals make me feel safe because I instinctively recognise the structure of the form. Les Misérables unsettles me because it breaks the form. At the end of the Prologue Valjean promises Another story must begin. The music swells, building, rising. I imagine the sun rising, clearing the filth away, I prepare for the ‘real’ opening number.

But when it comes, nothing has changed. At The End of The Day, everything is the same, we are still in the gutter, we are still in this filthy, depressing world. When I come to Fantine’s song, I Dreamed A Dream, I stop. This is passive. Where is the active want? Where is her desire that will drive the narrative? This is not a song that propels the character forward, this is a lament for a life already lost. At this point in a musical I have come to expect a song that will energise the momentum, that will outline the path to change. Les Misérables subverts everything I think I know.

When Les Misérables opened at the Barbican in 1985 it was panned by critics. Michael Ratcliffe, writing in The Observer called it “witless and synthetic”. But when producer Cameron Mackintosh rang the box office after the reviews came out he was told “the phones haven’t stopped ringing.” The people had spoken.

I wrote recently about how art can move beyond its origins to become a force, a zeitgeist cultural moment that enters the collective consciousness. The work must be recognisable, repeatable and transmissible. Les Misérables meets all those requirements. A work that enters the collective consciousness will often arrive at a time of unresolved social feeling.

Today, when we encounter a new musical we do so through a variety of media. We are saturated with images; rehearsal shots, trailers, TikTok, instagram, and so on. We can download the soundtrack in seconds, we can watch bootleg clips on YouTube, we can engage with the work on a number of levels in an instant. For months, sometimes years, before a new musical arrives we are primed on its development, the future audience becomes present, active participants. Familiarity is now engineered into the process of development. In 1985, I had one access point - the cassette recording.

For the next few months I listened to that tape on repeat. I would listen while I did my homework, as I fell asleep, as I day-dreamed out my window. My family quickly tired of me playing it on repeat and gave me a Sony Walkman. From then on it became the soundtrack of my life.

Les Misérables existed entirely in my own world, my imagination. I would listen in car journeys through Tottenham and Brixton, scenes of the recent riots. In Kilburn, I would listen to block out the noise of the market, my eyes roving past lines of working-class Irish women haggling over their weekly shop, the red graffiti of “Remember Bloody Sunday” scrawled on the wall behind Bejam.

I would listen on the bus on the way to school on my journey through run down Cricklewood Broadway, the derelict back streets of Ladbroke Grove, and on to the more well-heeled neighbourhoods of Chelsea and Fulham. I would listen as I browsed WH Smith, images of Boy George and Leigh Bowery bending gender in Face magazine, Jimmy Sommerville leering from the pages of NME, Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys pouting in a sailor hat on the cover of Smash Hits. The Les Misérables score blended with the sights and smells and energy of 80s London.

A work that enters the collective consciousness will often arrive at a time of unresolved social feeling.… By 1985, the promise of Thatcherism was beginning to fade. Les Misérables opened in London barely a year after the Battle of Orgreave and in the aftermath of the miners’ strike. Thatcher’s government had defeated them, the state had broken their solidarity, destroyed the community. On the news we watched as lines of men were defeated and beaten down. Les Misérables arrived in the silence that followed, beginning with that same line of men. Les Misérables did not offer moral resolution; the revolution fails, the students die. It offered a vision of resistance even within inevitable defeat. While the critics saw a work of art that confounded and unsettled them, audiences saw their reflection.

Fast forward.

It is New Years Eve 1989: I am 16 years old. As the clocks mark the change of the decade, I sit in a Chinese restaurant on Old Compton Street with my parents and my sister. We have just come from a performance of Les Misérables, the first time I have seen the show. I am unable to speak, the food tastes off. At midnight as the restaurant explodes with people singing Auld Lang Syne, clinking glasses, hugging each other, I stare out the window, holding back tears that had begun during A Heart Full of Love in Act One and hadn’t stopped until the show ended. I can feel my families irritation. I cannot explain what is happening to me: I am shaking. As Marius and Cosette sang, an emptiness opened up inside me.

A Heart Full of Love comes moments before the end of Act One. Gavroche has just announced the death of General Lamarque. This is one of the only spoken lines in Les Misérables, it comes with no underscore and marks a shift in the political world and the emotional arc of the score. Following this moment, the community rises with Do You Hear the People Sing? It is rousing and anthemic, one of those moments that will become detached from the show itself and circulate independently. It has been repurposed as protest song in America, Hong Kong, Ukraine.

In the aftermath, we see Cosette and Marius fall in love during the Love Montage sequence. Public hope allows private love to flourish and, for a moment, the audience is allowed to dream a dream. For a moment Les Misérables behaves as a musical should.

It is short-lived.

Beneath their duet, Éponine reminds us that, in this world, hope, like love, is not equitably distributed. It is granted to some and denied to others. Not to me, not for me.

In that precise moment, I understand with absolute clarity, that I am Éponine. The love of Marius and Cosette, the love of a boy for a girl, is not one I will experience. I stand outside this. Not to me, not for me. Tears flow.

Rewind.

My new school is strict. When I arrive they are still employing corporal punishment, continuing long after the practice was banned in state schools in 1986. We have Religious Education classes daily, prayer every morning, mass once a week and every high day and holy day we march, as a body, 2 miles to the Brompton Oratory Church in South Kensington. Mass at the Oratory is a kind of Baroque High Catholicism, deeply traditional, ornate, ascetic.

Les Misérables sat alongside this tradition. It is a musical that is structured around faith, around right and wrong. Javert and Valjean are often described as being men of great faith. Javert’s faith is rooted in the law. It is law rather than God that provides his moral compass. Valjean’s faith, by contrast, emerges from mercy and grace. Javert demands, Valjean pleads.

The faith I learn at school aligns more with Javert than with Valjean. It is a world of rules, of mortal and venial sins, of obedience without question, where faith required intercession. Les Misérables offers me faith as a personal reckoning. That radical possibility will guide me through the next few years.

We have a Religious Education lesson on homosexuality; no black and white, no middle-ground, homosexuality is an unforgivable sin. How very Javert. ’Love the sinner, hate the sin’ does not belong to the faith I am taught; it emerges later, when judgement learned to speak softly. Les Misérables’ ending, to love another person is to see the face of God, landed as both heresy and truth. It saves me.

Les Misérables begins with men. It begins with toil and labour and sweat. In most of the musicals I loved up to this point it was often the women who drove the narrative. Though often patriarchal, the form interrogates masculinity. Men want, act, change and are usually driven by romantic fulfilment. In Les Misérables, masculinity is reorganised. Desire is not the engine, endurance is. Men are defined not by what they pursue, but by what they are willing to suffer, relinquish, or die for. Vulnerability is elevated as is sacrifice but they are not rewarded with love. Les Misérables offers masculinity stripped of triumph, emptied of romance, and left with only belief.

Pause.

In 2004, at 31, when Les Misérables ended its run at the Palace theatre and moved to the Queens Theatre (now the Sondheim) I decided to quit my teaching job and apply to drama school. There was really only one choice for me. At the time Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts seemed to be a fertile training ground for the Les Misérables company. Hundreds of Mountview alumni have manned the famous barricade. I recently interviewed some Mountivew graduates and I am delighted that their choice to study there continues to be shaped by a desire to be part of this extraordinary show.

From 1985 to 2004, Les Misérables at the Palace was not just a show, it was a fixed point, a measure of change against something that endured and a meeting place. Let’s meet outside Les Miz, we’d say. It was a point of community, a piece of cultural infrastructure. When I consider what Les Misérables has meant to me over four decades I can see that it was always this fixed point of orientation, physically, structurally, emotionally.

Les Misérables didn’t just tell me a story. It told me where I was.