REVIEW: The Midnight Bell, Theatre Royal
Matthew Bourne decants another winner
This is how pubs used to be – no Sunday roasts or soft play, no live sport on giant screens and certainly no pints at a fiver or more. Just boozing, smoking and a loosening of inhibitions, at least while the alcohol flowed.
Full of life, they were also places where the likely end of life was clear for all to see, if anyone could be bothered or think straight.
Patrick Hamilton kept his wits about him (although alcohol killed him in the end).
His acutely observed novels set in and around the watering holes of 1930s London show them to be wells of loneliness, of fantastical dreams and doomed flirtations.
He was a people watcher as well as a drinker. He captured it all perfectly in novels such as Hangover Square and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, the trilogy which includes The Midnight Bell.
And who better than Matthew Bourne and his New Adventures company to distil the seedy glamour of it into a compelling spectacle?
No bare stage for this dance company. Lez Brotherston’s busy set sees the pub, The Midnight Bell, recreated beneath a sickly pea-souper sky with cobbles and gas lamps and railings all around.
And while Terry Davies’ musical score hits the spot with its mawdlin period ballads (to which the characters lip synch at key moments), Paul Groothuis’s sound design draws from nature with its flapping pigeons and barking dogs.
But all this is merely the backdrop, brilliant though it is.
It bursts into life with the 10 dancers – actor-dancers as they must be in New Adventures – who play out what are mostly (let’s be honest) sad little stories but with supreme grace and agility.
The cad seducing the lonely spinster, the barman hopelessly besotted with the disinterested young prostitute unaware that the shy barmaid has eyes only for him – as does an opportunistic older man for her.
Any crowd will have these little dramas, moments fleetingly seen and half-understood by the idle observer.
Here on stage they play out fluidly and simultaneously, the tentative interactions doomed to wilt before blossoming into proper relationships. Passion erupts to be suppressed, dreams console only to be thwarted.
The hope is there in spades – the often tragic hope – but danger never seems far away.
There’s the suitor whose mood swings are signalled by a screeching hiatus, the gay lover who turns out to be not what he seemed. And then there’s that strutting conman with his sham devotion.
If it sounds grim, it’s really wonderful to watch. Captivating, in fact. In each of the two acts (the second longer than the first), the first-night audience seemed mesmerised. I was mesmerised.
Rarely do I think at the end of a show, well, I could watch that all over again. Well, I really could have this time – although the dancers might have legged it to the pub (a busman’s holiday) before the thought was fully formed.
What a wonderful night’s entertainment! The applause was long, loud and well deserved - and generously reciprocated by the cast.
The Midnight Bell runs until Saturday, July 12. Tickets from the Theatre Royal box office.