Ada Harris, the titular character of Rachel Wagstaff and Richard Taylor’s musical adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, improves the lives of all those she comes into contact with. Her simple optimism and commitment to doing what is right has an effect greater than she could ever know.

The musical itself makes a similar impact. This is the third British outing for the show. Having received its world premiere at the Sheffield Crucible in 2016, followed by a revival at the Chichester Festival Theatre two years later (both directed by Daniel Evans), the piece finally makes its London debut in a new production directed by Bronagh Lagan.

Set in London in the postwar period, Flowers For Mrs. Harris portrays the everyday life of Ada Harris, a cleaning lady from Battersea, and the characters she comes into contact with – customers including Pamela, the Countess and the Major, and next door neighbour, Violet Butterfield. Jenna Russell’s Ada Harris is a woman grounded in routine, and her sphere of influence seemingly small – facts that she’s happy with, until one day, she’s met with an alien image – that of a brand new Christian Dior dress hanging in the wardrobe of a customer.

This simple item unlocks previously repressed desires in Mrs. Harris, and she starts to wonder if there is “more to life” than her humble lot. Not that she wants the world, mind you, she just wants “something to come home to”. The dress and the House of Dior represent an exquisite beauty not normally found in Mrs. Harris’s day-to-day, and for her just to own it as a representation of the something-more becomes her focus.

The first act principally concerns the journey Ada and Violet go on to save up enough money for the dress, and the pairing of Russell and Annie Wensak creates magic as the neighbours-turned-best-friends. There is much temptation for broad comedy in these characters – the familiar archetypes of hard-done-by working class widows keeping calm and carrying on – but Russell and Wensak play a more grounded, realistic version of this relationship. The women have simple wants and needs, but to have them or not is a matter of surviving or fading away into the background, a struggle keenly felt by all women of this generation, let alone those in middle age who have been widowed (and, in the case of Ada Harris, have no children).

Thus, Ada’s journey throughout the second act has even more impact thanks to this early work from them both, and the double-roles of the supporting actors serve to colour Ada’s journey with the diverse range of people she encounters. But one thing remains at the heart of all of this. For all of her personal loneliness, she brings people together. It’s this realisation in the final moments in which Jenna Russel’s masterful performance packs its final and weighty punch. It seems even more pertinent in a world where losing touch with simple values and genuine human connection is one of the biggest threats to humanity.

Elsewhere, there are wonderful performances from Kelly Price, Charlotte Kennedy and Pippa Winslow, each serving the intimate and intricate ensemble nature of the piece, their work never going above the demands of serving the whole. Despite having a seemingly simple plot and character set up, the piece is constructed like Swiss watch, and for any actor to give too much weight to their own contribution would create unbalance.

This Swiss watch-like construction is mostly thanks to Richard Taylor’s breathtaking music (in a terrific new reduced orchestration by Jason Carr). Taylor’s is the strongest musical voice in British theatre since George Stiles, and he carries much of that tradition with him. There are the influences of music hall, mid-century British Jazz (in a brilliant 5/4 passage in the first act), and folk music, but always through the prism of Taylor’s own voice, with strands and lines of melody fusing together to create a construction as intricate and as beautiful as a Dior dress. Perhaps it’s right that his surname is Taylor – musical tailoring seems an apt way to describe his approach to composition.

Much like Richard Rodgers with Allegro, Taylor mostly eschews the typical speech into song (or recitative into song) approach of most musicals, creating a work which features very few actual songs, opting for a slow-burn approach of steady and concentrated placement and development of themes throughout the score, allowing the audience to experience the journey of the characters without manipulation, but not at the sacrifice of aural guidance – the necessary sign posts of when to laugh, when to cry and when to applaud are still there.

That’s not to say that Taylor doesn’t know when to give us a song, he certainly does. And the sparseness of these moments mean they achieve maximum musical and dramatic effect when they do come. Take for example, Ada’s “I want” song upon her first glimpse of the Dior dress – “There Is More To Life”. The effect of time stopping and Ada’s world changing unfolds in front of us accompanied by a sumptuous melody, and Taylor (much like British musical theatre forefather Andrew Lloyd Webber) is not afraid to provide release with a melody such as this played fortissimo with stirring accompaniment. It’s just that he chooses these moments carefully.

The sad let-downs of this production are the venue itself, and the direction and design. The new Riverside Studios is an exciting building (despite having had a rocky few years since its opening), but it is not a space which lends itself to this kind of theatre. This production seems to be angling for a West End transfer, and, as such, exists in a ready-made proscenium arch production. This approach though, plays against the space rather than with it. The audience sit in uncomfortable chairs on bleacher-style risers whilst the performers work on a raised stage with nowhere near enough room for the piece to breathe.

It seems that the producers should have either opted to create a different kind of production which works with and in this kind of space (in-the-round, for example) or taken the production to a different (proscenium arch) venue altogether.

The small playing space is exacerbated by Nik Corrall’s cardboard cut out set. It makes neat use of a revolve, but the overabundance of physical structures and painted flats stifles the actors and the piece by overcrowding the space and taking too literal an approach. It was obvious that the set presented problems of practicality for the cast too, as actors could constantly be seen and heard bumping into parts of the set, or upsetting the washing lines used as a backdrop so that it would spend the next five minutes wobbling.

Bronagh Lagan’s amateurish direction does little to help on the above counts. A piece like this, with such simplicity at its core, needs physical space and a light touch to resonate. By taking a literal approach, Lagan makes it earthbound and weighs the piece down, never allowing it to truly soar in the way Taylor’s music or Russell’s performance do.

It’s a joy for this masterpiece of British musical theatre to finally be making its London debut, it just seems a shame that, in its current form, it’s unable to create the same sense of awe in its audience that Ada Harris feels the moment she lays eyes on that Dior dress.

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