Nowhere is that more true than in William’s relationship with his father (Sifiso Mazibuko), which provides the show’s dramatic backbone. As the famine tightens its grip and desperation sets in, the father retreats into what he knows: the old ways, the old certainties. William’s vision of a different future, once indulged, becomes an affront he cannot bear. He becomes his son’s most vocal opponent, and watching that rupture unfold, and the gradual, hard-won shift that follows as his wife (Madeline Appiah) and members of the village push him to see past his own fear, is where the production finds its deepest emotional heft. It is quietly devastating, and then quietly redemptive, in the way that only good storytelling can manage.

The score is another of the production’s many achievements. This is not a musical built around a handful of showstoppers with filler in between. Every song earns its place, and each one does a different kind of work: setting the scene, driving the narrative forward, heightening an emotion that words alone could not sustain.

The musical language is wide and genuinely exciting, moving between traditional African rhythms and vocal stylings, the reggae and ska inflections of music that has travelled and evolved, and the more familiar grammar of musical theatre. Occasionally, when the score shifts into that more conventional musical theatre register to serve a moment of narrative progression, it lands with the faintest jolt, only because what surrounds it is so distinctively and confidently itself.

It is less a flaw than a measure of how fully the production inhabits its own musical world. Everything coheres; it is simply that the traditional register soars so completely that the more familiar idiom feels, momentarily, like a different show knocking at the door.