Boublil and Schönberg’s Martin Guerre returns rewritten, semi-staged and in the round at The Old Vic for five weeks, 1 to 31 October 2026.
In 1548 a Basque peasant named Martin Guerre walked out of the village of Artigat and did not come back. Eight years later a man arrived claiming to be him, was accepted by the wife, the sisters and most of the village, and lived as Martin Guerre for three years before a dispute over property put him on trial. The court was close to acquitting him when the real Martin Guerre appeared on a wooden leg. The impostor, Arnaud du Tilh, was hanged. The trial judge wrote the case up in 1560 and it has been retold ever since, most famously by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis.
Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, who wrote Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, made a musical of it in 1996. It won an Olivier and never settled, and they have been rewriting it for thirty years. The case has also produced a film with Depardieu, an American remake and a shelf of academic argument about identity and proof, so a musical is not the strangest thing to have been made of it.
Matthew Warchus directs this new version at The Old Vic from Thursday 1 to Saturday 31 October 2026, with new music, new lyrics and folk-inflected orchestrations, played semi-staged in the round. Five weeks, and the billing is honest about what it is: a version tested in front of an audience before the one that tours.