Exclusive:Popular Scottish city pub to be recreated as musical writer vows to 'restore story of One Day to Edinburgh'

The musical version of the bestselling novel One Day is to be premiered in Edinburgh early next year.

Iconic Edinburgh pub The Pear Tree is to be recreated on stage in the musical of One Day to be premiered in the capital.

Writer David Greig, who is adapting the book for the theatre, said the well-known venue would be the basis for the pub scene where characters Emma and Dexter first meet as students at the University of Edinburgh.

David Greig, former artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, is adapting novel One Day into a musical.

The world premiere of the new musical version of the bestselling novel by David Nicholls, which was last year adapted as a series for Netflix, is to open next year at the Royal Lyceum Theatre.

Love the arts? Us too - subscribe now to our dedicated newsletter

Speaking at the Lyceum's programme launch for next season, Mr Greig said he had also taken inspiration from tourist attraction the Camera Obscura in staging the play, which will see the 140-year-old auditorium transformed into a theatre in the round, with audience members on both sides of a newly constructed stage.

Mr Greig, who recently left his role as artistic director of the Lyceum to be replaced by James Brining, said one challenge in adapting One Day was that it doesn’t have a clear “world”, like many other stage shows.

Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall star as Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew as Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley in the new Netflix series One Day, which is based on author David Nicholls' best-selling novel. The novel is being turned into a stage musical. Picture: Netflix

He said: “If you go to see Guys and Dolls, it’s 47th Street, New York in the 1940s. So you get a designer and you design that world. But what is the ‘world’ of two young people who meet in Edinburgh in 1988 - then one is going around the world and the other is in Salford and then they’re in London? They’re just in ‘Britain’ in the ‘90s and early 2000s, so that creates quite a problem.

“If you’ve got a scene change and it’s just a year ahead and she’s working in a restaurant, it’s so pedantic. What we want to do is create something where the audience are in the pub where they’re graduating. Secretly, it’s the Pear Tree, that’s what’s in my head.

“There will be this feeling that you [the audience] are in the room. And what we want to do is have Emma and Dexter in a circle of light, just following them.”

He added: “I feel we are restoring it to being an Edinburgh story. I don’t know many other popular novels that mention Rankeillor Street.”

Mr Greig said the atmosphere of the staging had been inspired by the Camera Obscura on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a Victorian invention that projects a real time image of the city onto a viewing table using light and lenses.

He said: “In the Camera Obscura, you peer down and you look at people in real life walking down the High Street and you can spy on them.

“I wanted us to feel like the only two people who didn’t know they were in a play are Emma and Dexter. Everybody else is playing different parts and they’re moving things around and it’s very theatrical. But in the middle of it, there is this couple and their story.”

The Lyceum has been turned into a theatre in the round before, during the Covid pandemic, for the staging of Life Is a Dream, when audience members were required to be socially distanced.

Mr Greig said: “We were trying to do social distancing, we weren’t able to get a lot of audience in, but I loved the look of it. I thought it was amazing, so that stayed in my mind.”

The Lyceum’s new artistic director, Mr Brining, who started in the role two months ago, said the run of five weeks, from February 27, is likely to be extended if tickets prove as popular as expected.