<p>Long after the smoke has drifted from the battlefield, audiences will remember Courtenay.</p>
<p>This musical plucked from the Kentish history books - and fashioned into a sophisticated entertainment by a composer and lyricist relatively new to the genre – deserves its place on a wider stage.</p>
<p>By turns exciting and tender, thought-provoking and uplifting, Courtenay is set around 20 years after the Peterloo massacre and looks behind the curious story of the last battle to be fought on English soil and makes a cracking, three-dimensional show of it. Composer, orchestrator and musical director, Ethan Lewis Maltby, not yet 30 but nevertheless a self-confessed fan of the swashbuckling era, has sewn a rich seam of interwoven themes throughout the two acts. His music hits spot.</p>
<p>While paying plentiful homage to his first musical love, percussion, the score has pace, vitality and, dare I say it, hummability and while that may not be fashionable it certainly helps to convince ticket-buyers that they have had their money’s worth. See a show and take a tune away with you is no bad slogan even for a modern musical.</p>
<p>Each of the central characters in Courtenay has a haunting theme of his or her own which blend to great effect at moments of tenderness, for this show is not all about dreams of the 19th century working man finding his true worth under the sleety, unforgiving gaze of establishment figures.</p>
<p>Lyricist Christopher Neame has taken a complex subject and given a perspective to Courtenay's story that many historians have discarded in favour of a simplistic view that the protagonist was mad and all his followers simple. The lyrics, particularly those given to Courtenay are intelligent without being polemical.</p>
<p>At the opening at Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre on Thursday it was hard to find any chinks in this emotive story of one man's slide from visionary enthusiasm to self-delusion and destruction. There were some technical problems, chiefly with the sound balance, but the principals and ensemble worked together to produce a first night to be proud of.</p>
<p>The show is fortunate in having a trio of voices at the top that would match the best the West End has to offer. Loren Geeting as Courtenay, Renée Salewski as the object of his desire, Sarah Culver and David Wyatt as Nicholas Mears, the lover cast aside by Culver for Courtenay’s more dazzling attractions, are a class act. Wyatt has a voice that we will hear again and again if the scouts are doing their job and Geeting and Salewski both live up to their credentials.</p>
<p>Lindsey Mack as the Canterbury Marshal, Captain Townsend, cuts a dash darkly as the man who is out to thwart Courtenay's egalitarian ambitions. His presence is like that of a sinister crow. Antonia Bond generates tenderness as the wife Courtenay left behind, struggling to understand her husband’s wild side and Anthony Garner provides a solid presence as the narrator Everyman who guides the audience, many of whom will be unfamiliar with the story, carefully and unobtrusively.</p>
<p>Set design is also instrumental to the success of this show. Veteran film and TV designer Roy Stannard, a newcomer to the theatre whose credits include David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, has produced a simple, yet effective raked platform in which most of the action is concentrated, focusing the attention perfectly.</p>
<p>All this is overseen by a reaper, a simple agricultural machine seen as the means by which the landowner will emasculate the labourer.</p>
<p>As the show opens, the machine, cast as the grim reaper, dominates a stark scene as the countrysiders who will come to follow Courtenay, scrape a living from the soil while sinister clouds drift across the landscape. The climate of fear is brought home by blood-red effects schemed by Ben M Rogers, a lighting designer with many West End and international credits to his name, whose skills help to create Courtenay's many memorable moods.</p>
<p>This homespun show is something Kent can be proud of and one that audiences anywhere would appreciate. Surely local history was never this alive, or so worthy of the standing ovation it got on Thursday.</p>
<p>Russell Flint