Why are there no middle-aged women in musicals?

The 53-year-old lead character in 'Flowers for Mrs Harris' – being revived at Chichester Festival Theatre after a triumphant first run in Sheffield – might be unique in the annals of musical history

Ada Harris - played by Clare Burt, alongside Claire Machin as Violet, in Flowers for Mrs Harris - is 'gentler, wiser and more caring than most of the models we see around us' (Johan Persson)

In American musicals there are often parts for the slightly more mature woman – the friend of the innocent heroine, the wisecracking commentator on the events unfolding. I always wanted to be that woman: the taxi-driver in On the Town, the smart-talking reporter in High Society, the rich heiress in An American in Paris.

Even in The Sound of Music, it always seemed to me that it might be more fun to be the baroness with all her wealth, than Maria, who inherits seven children. Especially in the film when she was played by Eleanor Parker and wore all the best frocks. These women don’t always get their man, and they never land the hero, but they do seem to have a richer life than many musical ingénues. They have traction in the real world of compromise, rather than living in a musical dreamland.

But Mrs Harris, star of Flowers for Mrs Harris, now being revived at Chichester Festival Theatre after a triumphant first run in Sheffield’s Crucible two years ago, is really something else. In fact, Mrs Harris might be unique in the annals of musical history in that she is a downtrodden London charlady, yet she is not the sidekick or the comic turn, but the heroine of a show that takes her from the daily grind of cleaning people’s homes to the glamour of the Dior showroom in Paris, in pursuit of the New Look dress that she has set her heart on owning. She is, explicitly, 53 years old. And a widow.

Traditional musicals, because they allow their characters to sing about their innermost feelings, are good at accessing the heart (Johan Persson)

It was the producer Vicky Graham who originally brought Paul Gallico’s 1958 novella Mrs ’A​rris Goes to Paris to the attention of the playwright Rachel Wagstaff (who adapted Birdsong for the stage) and the composer Richard Taylor (who most recently wrote the musical The Go Between.) Wagstaff read it on the train after their meeting – and found herself in tears. “It’s a very moving story,” she says. “Small, but very human and important because it speaks to all of us. We’ve all had something we’ve longed for. We’ve all had absences that have to be filled.”

Taylor was struck by the fact that the story has one enormous twist. “You only read something for the first time once, so I always make a note of how I feel,” he says. “So originally I just thought, nice story, but then this thing happens and it made me gasp. That’s a real shared experience. That’s the thing I always look for.”

Since then the musical has been much worked upon, as the two collaborated not only with each other, but with the director Daniel Evans and the cast, led by the luminous Clare Burt as Ada Harris, to bring it to the stage. It has changed even in rehearsal in Chichester. But its essence remains. “There’s a vitality to the story,” says Taylor. “I like shows that really make you think.”

Wagstaff points out although the show is set in dingy post-war London – beautifully evoked in Lez Brotherston’s magical designs, that then fill with colour, life and possibility when the action switches to Paris – its truths (as in all the best musicals) are universal. Mrs Harris may be stuck in a daily round of drudgery for often ungrateful and unthinking clients, she might wear baggy cardigans and badly fitting dresses and look a bit washed out, but from the very beginning you are on her side. “There’s something so unassuming but so generous about both the character and the piece,” she says. “I feel it is very loving.”

Indeed it is. It was that quality of love, of a humanity that is so rarely seen on stage, that first struck me when I saw the show at the Crucible. Traditional musicals, because they allow their characters to sing about their innermost feelings, are good at accessing the heart. They are nearly always based around the fulfilment of dreams. However, this musical, by focusing on characters a million miles away from the youthful beauties of the classic show, and by allowing ordinary people to sing about their hopes, accesses a different kind of empathy.

Dior’s sales pitch to the women who were buying his wondrous New Look dresses, which celebrated the end of wartime fabric rationing with their full skirts and luxurious shapes, was “every woman is a princess”. That idea, that fashion can help you become the best version of yourself, that it can literally fashion you into the person you long to be, is the underlying reason so many women (and men, come to that) love and lust after clothes they can never afford. It is aspirational.

In western society today, that essential upwards impulse has been distorted by the kind of consumerism where everybody wants everything immediately. Flowers for Mrs Harris, where a woman saves for a dress step by careful step, where she never lets her dream blind her to the need for kindness and charity, is a clarion call to values of a different kind. People respond so strongly to it because it reminds them of the people they want to be: gentler, wiser and more caring than most of the models we see around us, on stage, on screen and on political soap boxes. And it’s all thanks to a 53-year-old woman. There is a lesson in that, somewhere.

Flowers for Mrs Harris is at Chichester Festival Theatre until 29 September