Sexy, smouldering and sad, Matthew Bourne’s new full-evening work is based on the semi-neglected novels of Patrick Hamilton. But it also belongs in the world of Hamilton’s contemporary the playwright Terence Rattigan, and those terrible inequalities of passion that are never quite spoken but tear lives apart.
Melancholy, frustration and desire seep out of the limbs of all the characters we meet in the surroundings of a pub called The Midnight Bell, the title of one of Hamilton’s books and the key setting for this piece. They seek solace at the bottom of a glass, then stretch in longing, pushing their bodies into one another, propelled by terrible loneliness and the need for human contact.
The place they inhabit physically and psychically is richly imagined by Bourne’s longtime New Adventures collaborators. Designer Lez Brotherston conjures a 1930s Soho with windows that hang from the sky, some iron railings, a lamppost, and the top of a red telephone box. Different settings – the pub itself, a Lyons’ Corner House, a cinema – are suggested with minimal props and overhead lights.
The silhouetted skyline is illuminated by Paule Constable in different shades of the day and the year; a a London fog hangs over everything. Terry Davies provides a fabulously bluesy score, full of aching feeling, while Paul Groothuis’s sound design perfectly evokes the city’s streets, the hum of traffic, the occasional burst of birdsong.
Bourne’s choreography is as fleet and precise as the setting. The characters, culled from across Hamilton’s novels and set in new relationships to each other, could seem like ciphers: the out-of-work actor, the spinster, the cad, the chorus boy. But each is given exact outward expression and a yearning inner life. Like Dennis Potter, Bourne makes them intermittently lip-sync to the popular songs of the time, the romance of their dreams contrasting with the tawdriness of their lives. But he also finds steps that make that divergence specific.
Waiter Bob, wonderfully played by the apparently boneless Paris Fitzpatrick, has a puppy dog ardour as he pursues the pink-coated prostitute (sorrowful Bryony Wood), who rejects his tender advances. As Ella, the barmaid who loves Bob but is courted by another, Bryony Harrison moves with upright control, her arms flicking out at the elbows, while Daisy May Kemp’s languorous actor is all sinuous siren poses.
When Richard Winsor’s agonised George Harvey Bone imagines possessing her, he burrows his head in her outstretched leg, coiling his body around her. The two gay characters – Bourne’s innovation – danced by Liam Mower and Andrew Monaghan, move from inhibition to affection via small gestures. When their love affair runs aground, Mower expresses despair by pulling at his arms repeatedly, as if trying to slough his own skin. The taking-off of a jacket can reveal a detail of an emotion; even the lifting of a glass becomes symbolic of feeling as Michela Meazza’s Miss Roach knowingly sheds her repression to find a moment of release.
The narrative is fragmentary but the darkness is all-pervasive. Beautifully danced, it’s a triumph of Bourne’s genius for exact storytelling; a glimpse into a world of wasted lives.
The Midnight Bell is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 9 October, and touring until 27 November
