“One Day: The Musical” at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Mark Brown in Scotland’s capital
★★★☆☆
17 March 2026

Scotland’s producing theatres – like their sibling playhouses across the UK – have found themselves in a more than usually precarious financial position in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s no secret that Edinburgh’s repertory theatre, the Royal Lyceum, has been in particularly straitened circumstances.

Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose.
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic. 

This might explain why the theatre is currently staging – in this adaptation of David Nicholls’s blockbuster novel One Day – its third musical theatre production in the last 12 months. The stage musical genre is famously lucrative (and, some might say, more often than not, populist).

There can be little doubt that a musical based on Nicholls’s prose fiction – which has already spawned a successful feature film and a popular Netflix TV series – has significant commercial potential. Indeed, such are the money-spinning possibilities of the planned transfer of the show to London, that the co-producers (London-based company Melting Pot and the Lyceum) came to a sudden (and controversial) decision ahead of last week’s press night that they would not invite the UK national press (The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the rest) to review in Edinburgh, preferring that those publications help the show to make a splash at the time of the London transfer.

This decision led to 15 Scotland-based critics (including yours truly) signing an open letter criticising the co-producers for a “divisive” ruling that sought to create “two tiers” of critic north of the Border.

The off-stage shenanigans threatened to overshadow the production on-stage. However, the play’s the thing, as Hamlet so rightly observed. The show itself boasts music and lyrics by Abner & Amanda Ramirez (aka musical duo JOHNNYSWIM), a crisp book by the prolific dramatist (and recent Lyceum artistic director) David Greig, and additional lyrics by Jeremy Sams.

Its staging is unconventional, in the sense that a virtual theatre-in-the-round has been constructed by means of placing a raked bank of seats on the back of the Lyceum stage, cabaret-style tables for audience members on the edge of the performance space, with further seating in the traditional stalls and circles. The impact of this is to draw the audience closer to the action, while, notably, maintaining a sizeable number of all-important bums on seats.

Director Max Webster’s production stars superb performers Sharon Rose and Jamie Muscato as the story’s central pairing of, respectively, northern English, working-class novelist Emma Morley and posh, troubled TV presenter Dexter Mayhew. As any fan of Nicholls’s narrative (in any of its multiple forms) will tell you, the story traces the pair’s tempestuous relationship over 20 years, alighting always (and only) on July 15 (St Swithin’s Day).

The piece is a tale of unlikely love frustrated and denied. When “Em and Dex” first meet at Edinburgh University, she is politically conscious and idealistic, while he is the kind of upper class playboy you would reasonably expect Emma to despise.

The ensuing two decades are the stuff of the popular musical. Nicholls’s tale unfurls a tragicomic romance that dives into melodrama with the alacrity of a toddler who has been confronted by a large puddle.

The play’s songbook ranges from self-consciously sentimental numbers (such as the title song and the wistful “Make a Life Worth Living”) to an upbeat rave number that has (deliberately faint) echoes of “The Prodigy”. The songs serve the show’s shifting moods faithfully, but, in truth, their abundant competence never graduates to the kind of Sondheimesque brilliance that would make them a staple on BBC Radio 2.

The design and technical work are admirable. The production moves at pace (and with deceptive ease) through a head-spinning panoply of locations, including a maze in the grounds of an English country house, an exclusive London club and a public park in Paris.

This adaptation is an expertly constructed and universally well performed work of musical theatre. It has all of the boldness and amplified emotion that so often characterise its genre.

A work of subtlety it is not, but (as evinced from the rapturous reception it received in Edinburgh last Thursday evening) it seems destined for commercial success.

At Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh until 19 April: https://lyceum.org.uk/