It seemed almost to patronise the anti-fascists by presenting them joyfully and heroically.  There was no real attempt to show how fascists got that way.  True, one young man with whom we sympathise, unable to get work, threatened with eviction, becomes a fascist and we understand why – but he is, implausibly, thrown out of  the British Union of Fascists within days.  In the real world, that young man would have left in his own good time, when he saw fascism for what it was.

The historically absurd scene in which he is expelled has uniformed fascists acting like parody  sinister Nazis – “ve are asking ze kvestions.” It makes fascism no more dreadful – in fact, it almost sanitises fascism – to have its adherents behaving like stage villains from a children’s play.

Some of the best ideas seem stale.  The central romance – Jewish boy and Irish girl fall in love – was done much better, and given the complexity that it lacks here, in Martin McNamara’s Mosley Must Fall. A song “The rich blame the poor, The poor blame the rich, And everyone blames the Jews” has more than an echo of Tom Lehrer’s famous National Brotherhood Week: “The white folks hate the black folks, The black folks hate the white folks, And everyone hates the Jews.”

At over 2 ½ hours including interval, the show is a little longer than either the music or the plot can stand.  But it has charm, and talent, and musicality, and love, and it ends satisfactory with everyone uniting to fight the landlords.  Its heart is in the right place, and it’s very, very timely.