Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell brings to life Patrick Hamilton’s seedy, lovelorn characters — review

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Are you sitting comfortably? It’s storytime at Sadler’s Wells, which is providing a home for narrative dance dramas by two of the UK’s best contemporary companies. Both productions take their inspiration from great 20th-century novels and both are danced and played to the hilt by vivid and versatile performers.

Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell takes its name from the pub at the heart of Patrick Hamilton’s seedy, sweat-stained novel of that title, which maps the interlocking lives of a barmaid, the barman she adores and the teenage prostitute who breaks the barman’s heart. Meat enough for a two-act drama but too short a cast list to service Bourne’s seasoned team of dance actors, so he widened the scenario to include characters from Hamilton’s other novels, all drawn from life. The sharp-suited Ernest Ralph Gorse from Hamilton’s Gorse Trilogy was modelled on Neville Heath, a conman turned sadistic killer of the 1940s. Hangover Square’s George Harvey Bone and his doomed love for the pitiless, beautiful Netta was a thinly veiled treatment of Hamilton’s own obsession with the Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. To this rich mix Bourne adds a forbidden love affair between a police constable and a chorus boy.

This miserable menagerie make up the regulars of the pub which is evoked with stylish economy by Lez Brotherston. Sash windows, park railings, lampposts and neon signs conjure the flyblown grandeur of Fitzroy Square, while minimal props — the pub bar, a park bench, a rumpled bed — whizz in and out of shot, letting us know exactly where we are. This scene-setting bric-a-brac is backed by a skyline of chimney pots and treetops against a prismatic winter sky. 

Bourne always trusts his audience to absorb more than one story at a time — two or three couples can literally share the same bed — but when focus is needed Paule Constable’s atmospheric lighting guides the eye through the multi-stranded narrative to the heart of the action. Terry Davies’s score is punctuated by a delectable 1930s playlist of songs sung by Al Bowlly and others which are lip-synced by the cast, Dennis Potter-style.

Thursday’s performances were all outstanding, the tics and foibles of interwar body language revealing the age, social class, sexual status and inner torment of Hamilton’s characters. Michela Meazza, marcelled to perfection, was a whole novel’s worth of lovelorn bitterness as Gorse’s victim. As Gorse, Glenn Graham made Bourne’s duets seem a natural extension of his preening, man-spreading gestures. Dominic North is the sweet-natured barman whose dreams hold this portmanteau narrative together and who supplies the final vignette, offering the promise of a world elsewhere.

★★★★☆

Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Inside Giovanni’s Room ends its spring tour at Sadler’s Wells East this week. This powerful reimagining of James Baldwin‘s 1956 novel of gay Paree was choreographed by director Marcus Jarrell Willis and set to a propulsive commissioned score from Marc Strobel. Willis’s writing is unfailingly varied and expressive and the hero’s tender, tentative awakening in the room of the title is brilliantly managed, always remaining a dance. Phoenix, led by Teige Bisnought (as our hero) and Dylan Springer (as Giovanni), have never looked better.

★★★★☆

‘The Midnight Bell’ to June 21 and touring to October 4, new-adventures.net

‘Inside Giovanni’s Room’ to June 14, sadlerswells.com