The Matthew Bourne show they call "silky, sexy, intoxicating"
Michela Meazza on dancing Miss Roach
The North East love affair with Matthew Bourne has endured since his famous production of Swan Lake brought the house down at the Theatre Royal in the 1990s.
It was reaffirmed in April when his reimagining of the ballet, with its flock of male swans, returned on its 30th anniversary tour.
But now comes something different from Bourne’s New Adventures dance company – a foray into the world of Patrick Hamilton whose novels, with names like Hangover Square, recall the pubs of London’s Soho in the inter-war years.
It’s a world of late night drinking and unrequited love, of dangerous liaisons and smoke-filled rooms. Hamilton knew this world. His trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is said to be semi-autobiographical.
He wrote two famous plays which became films, Rope, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Gaslight. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1962, aged 58.
“Matthew has ventured into something quite different,” says dancer Michela Meazza who has been with the company since the early days of Swan Lake, in which she performed in the West End and America.
“There’s a lot more darkness – darker characters – but there is hope at the end, I think. It’s quite special.”
Famous for springing surprises, the great dance innovator had been thinking of doing a new and more intimate piece, Michela recalls.
It was to be a smaller production, “maybe more along the lines of Play Without Words (his hit of 2002, set in the 1960s) based on characters and acting but without a script”.
Michela says she’d heard of Rope and Gaslight but not Patrick Hamilton.
“But then I was introduced to this amazing writer
“When we toured the show we realised not many people do know his novels. But I totally fell in love with his writing and now I tell everyone: you must read them.”
Having settled on Patrick Hamilton and The Midnight Bell, the pub in which many of his stories woozily unfold, the pandemic happened and the novels became the dancers’ lockdown reading.
Hamilton himself might have enjoyed the dark irony of that.
Looking back, Michela says the stories in many ways mirrored the experiences of lockdown, “the lack of connection, the solitude and loneliness for some people.
“It fed into the piece. Even Matthew says he’s sure it reflects what we’d all been through.”
Lockdown for dancers, with social distancing contrary to everything they know, was a tough experience.
“By the time we were able to get back to the studio we were desperate to create and be together and connect,” recalls Michela.
Rather than an adaptation of a single novel, The Midnight Bell evokes Patrick Hamilton’s fictional world with storylines and characters plucked from several of them.
Researching and inhabiting Miss Roach became Michela’s lockdown project.
“She’s a spinster, a character from The Slaves of Solitude (Hamilton’s 1947 novel) where she falls in love with a lieutenant.
“But in our piece the relationship is with Mr Gorse who belongs to a different novel (Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, 1953). But there are lots of similarities.
“Miss Roach hasn’t been in a relationship for a long time. She’s a bit prim, very set in her ways. She goes to the pub to socialise but needs a drink for courage.
“What I gathered from the book is her constant internal monologue, questioning her actions and talking herself into doing things she didn’t think she could do.”
There is, she admits, a lot of drinking.
“But we all had to think: why does your character drink? What drives them? It’s not just for leisure. It’s linked to solitude, not being able to connect, feeling insecure.
“There are so many reasons but when you think about it, you come to understand your character.”
Michela says she loves this way of dancing, born not just of ingrained physical technique but incorporating body language and facial expression.
Having danced with other companies, she reckons it’s special to Matthew Bourne and not something that suits all dancers.
She remembers being at the London Studio Centre, where she had come from Italy to study dance at 18, and Matthew Bourne coming one day to teach her ballet class.
He had them creating characters in a way that was quite new to her and she loved it.
Later she auditioned for Swan Lake and she has been with the company (off and on – for that’s the way it works) ever since, contracted to dance in many New Adventures productions.
A mother-of-two now, with a daughter of 13 and a football-mad son of 10, she says she always welcomes a call from the company if there’s a suitable role.
Explaining its particular demands, she says: “It’s difficult to transform emotion into movement. It’s a real skill but that’s what Matthew wants.
“There are movements you’ll try and Matthew will say it doesn’t suit the character so you try something else.
“Sometimes you’re surprised when you create some movement and it somehow works in that specific moment. Sometimes I still struggle to understand how we get there.
“People outside sometimes say, ‘How do you create the movement?’ I don’t know. It’s a very organic process.”
The first tour of The Midnight Bell in 2021 ended well for Michela, her Miss Roach earning her a National Dance Award for outstanding female modern performance.
But she says the tour suffered a little for the Covid restrictions still in place. Understandably, audiences had been a little sparse at first.
“Now, coming back to it, we feel so excited.
“It feels the piece has now had the space to grow and to connect with the audience. I think the first time we were all still experimenting a bit and this time it’s really strong.”
And her excitement at returning to the Theatre Royal, where she has performed “many times” with New Adventures, sounds anything but forced.
“I’ve got wonderful memories of Newcastle,” she says.
“The company love coming to Newcastle. It’s one of our favourite venues. Sometimes we even do two weeks if it’s a very big show.
“We love it there and audiences are so warm and supportive.”
The Midnight Bell is at The Theatre Royal from Tuesday, July 8, until Saturday, July 12. Tickets from the Theatre Royal box office or tel. 0191 2327010.