Latest news with #JimBroadbent
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry — a pitch-perfect musical version
★★★★★In 2012 Rachel Joyce achieved unexpected literary success with her miraculously ordinary, defiantly down-to-earth novel about a man who goes out to post a letter and ends up walking the length of England. This humane, wryly funny musical is the latest art form to celebrate the fictional Harold Fry — a retired man who measures out his life in lawnmowing sessions until a message from a dying former colleague inspires an odyssey from Devon to Berwick. Mark Addy plays Harold just two years after a film of the book, starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, opened to mixed reviews. Why risk a musical then, sceptics might ask. Yet this assured, pitch-perfect production — with a ravishing indie-folk score by Passenger — quickly dispels any
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rachel Joyce: My favourite read is like Emma Bovary meets Quentin Tarantino
Born in 1962, Rachel Joyce worked as a nanny, door-to-door saleswoman, barmaid and actress. And although she has written since she was a child, her debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was not published until she was 50. She has more than made up for the time: Harold Fry won a National Book award, was longlisted for the Booker prize and, more recently, adapted into a film starring Jim Broadbent. She has since published six other novels, including Miss Benson's Beetle, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North and The Homemade God. I am lucky enough as a radio writer to have adapted several of the classics for BBC Radio 4, but the one I always wanted — and
