Martin Guerre

Martin Guerre begins with a village wedding that produces no child, and a young husband who leaves rather than face what the neighbours have decided that means. Bertrande is left neither wife nor widow, and the village runs out of patience with her.

Then a man walks in claiming to be Martin Guerre. He knows the house, the family, the names of people long dead. Bertrande accepts him, and the marriage that never worked becomes, for the first time, a marriage. The village prospers. Everyone involved has a reason not to examine the story too closely, and the story holds until the day somebody arrives who can disprove it.

Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil wrote the musical, following their work on Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, with English lyrics developed by Edward Hardy and later Stephen Clark. It reached the stage in 1996 and was substantially rewritten more than once afterwards, which is unusual and worth knowing: several distinct versions of the piece exist.

The score is folk-inflected and choral, built around a community that sings as a bloc, and the setting is a sixteenth-century village where a Protestant minority is living quietly among Catholic neighbours. That tension runs underneath the deception and eventually decides how it ends.

The case it comes from is real and documented, which gives the ending its weight. The question the show leaves is not whether the man was lying, but whether Bertrande knew, and how long she had known.