Les Misérables

What Les Misérables actually is

A man serves nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, builds a respectable life under a false name, and spends the rest of it being followed by a policeman who believes the law is a moral fact. That is Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, compressed to a single evening and sung almost end to end.

Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, original French lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. There is barely any spoken dialogue: the score runs continuously, which is why the running time is 2 hours 50 minutes and why the interval falls where it does.

The barricade at the centre of the second half is not the French Revolution. It is the June Rebellion of 1832 — a two-day Paris insurrection that failed, and whose failure is the point. The show does not let its students win.

The staging you would see now is not the one that ran for the first thirty-four years. The revolving stage was retired in 2019; Matt Kinley's design puts backdrops based on Hugo's own paintings behind the cast instead, lit by Paule Constable. If you know one song it is "I Dreamed a Dream"; the others people leave humming are "On My Own", "Bring Him Home" and "One Day More".