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Peaky Blinders may have left TV, but the cult crime drama is spinning off in all directions. A film is due, there’s a video game, fashion line and immersive theatre show. Perhaps most ambitious of all is this new dance production.
Series creator Steven Knight teams up with modern dance company Rambert for a sort-of prequel and mostly cracking night out.
Even if, like me, you’ve only dabbled in the series, a recorded narration from poet and series regular Benjamin Zephaniah keeps you on track. We’re shoved into the First World War. On a smoke-filled stage, to the thrash and churn of an ace live band, soldiers endure shell-shocked judders and fearful tremors.
The show’s protagonist, Tommy Shelby, and his comrades crawl from the trenches, ready for a life of crime as the Peaky Blinders because, says Zephaniah, they’ve been left “dead inside.”
The first half is a belter. It never lets up as the lads return to Birmingham and matriarch Polly (a nonchalant Simone Damberg-Würtz), and get rich quick and callous with it.
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The band tears into the vibrations of an enterprise on the rise, with Roman GianArthur’s commissioned score weaving round Nick Cave and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, on a stage glinting with assertive design and moody light (by Moi Tran and Natasha Chivers).
The choreographer Benoit Swan Pouffer leans hard on the swagger: the Blinders’ signature caps, sharp tailoring and implacable attitude. Hips sway, shoulders slash, legs perform a vicious swivel – it’s sexy stuff. Pouffer’s gift here is for group numbers squelchy with atmosphere: hard-graft factory, racetrack, nightclub.
The dancers devour this succulent material until juice runs down their chins. Individual characters are less distinctive – most moves are uniform, even for Tommy himself. Unlike scrappy Cillian Murphy, Rambert’s Guillaume Quéau portrays an intimidating tree trunk of a man, leading with his flailing fists.
Apart from Musa Motha’s Barney, pure quicksilver on crutches, the only character to take flight is Tommy’s great love Grace. We first see her as a club singer, lip-synching to Laura Mvula in an emerald frock: an outstanding Naya Lovell radiates duck-and-dive charisma. Then a turf war with a rival crew led by Aishwarya Raut’s vengeful widow interrupts their wedding.
It’s a dance of two halves, and the second one’s a downer. A now-bereft Tommy fogs his misery with drugs: there’s a protractedly drowsy opium den sequence, the band take their feet off the pedal, and Quéau can’t open a window on Tommy’s torment.
He returns to combat, the gangs pummelling lumps out of each other, but it’s a vendetta from which no one can emerge victorious. Even if the show loses its initial drive, Rambert’s gleaming dancers leave it all on the cobbles in a rousing evening.