This musical begins like a cheesy Mills & Boon romance and goes downhill from there, taking bizarre turns into biomolecular science.
Maggie (Madalena Alberto), a celebrated biophysicist who only believes in the material world, goes to Italy and meets Luke (Tim Rogers), who wears his shirt unbuttoned almost to the navel and gives mountaintop tutorials about mysticism.
“I usually hate when men do that open shirt thing,” she sings, but before we know it they are in love. Ideology stands in the way of their happy-ever-after, though: questions of God v science and whether love is a chemical reaction or a bolt from above, all of which is discussed again and again, in song.
This could be Shirley Valentine, to some degree, were it not for all their warbling on peptides and molecules (on her side) and God (on his). Warner Brown’s book and lyrics are flat and banal, with songs such as Fuck – I Believed by Luke and The Chemical Brain by Maggie.
Directed by Jenny Eastop, it is a leaden piece of work, with little choreography other than the odd lovers’ twirl. Luke, who thankfully changes his shirt and could well be a creationist, is a pancake-flat character while Maggie behaves like a lovesick teenager rather than a world-renowned scientist.
In the mix is a secondary couple who have come to the same corner of Italy as tourists but barely seem to know each other. Heather (Molly Lynch) is one step ahead of the mystic and says she regularly speaks to dead poets and writers including Keats and EM Forster. Her companion, Connor (Joaquin Pedro Valdes), mostly watches the others, with a look of permanent bewilderment. Who can blame him?
Three musicians dressed in white sit on an all-white stage which has the air of a George Michael pop video, circa 1986. They are all good, especially the cellist (Georgia Morse), but they do not have much to work with in Joshua Schmidt’s jagged, dissonant score. The actors are good, too – especially Alberto, who has a stupendous singing voice – but they are wasted in this spectacularly strange concoction.
At Riverside Studios, London, until 22 April
