I watched every second of all six series of Peaky Blinders and at no point did I think: “Wow. This would make a really good dance work!” I don’t believe Benoit Swan Pouffer did either. What I think happened is that the artistic director of Rambert was looking for a story that would extend his dance company’s reach beyond the usual narratives, chanced upon the hugely popular saga of the violent Shelby family and thought: “Aha!”
The resulting story, premiered to a hugely enthusiastic Birmingham audience, isn’t bad. But never once does it feel felt or earned; it’s all surface and no depth, a marketing person’s fantasy, not an engaging work.
The opening promises more than it ultimately delivers. Tommy Shelby’s first world war gang of tunnellers emerge on stage from down low, pulling themselves upright into a phalanx of the damaged, shoulders twitching, eyes wide. Natasha Chivers’s lighting, moody and magnificent, surrounds them in swirls of yellowish smoke.
Then there’s a voiceover, intoned by poet and series regular Benjamin Zephaniah: “You young men of the tunnelling brigade, you are all dead … condemned to a life without a soul.” And we’re off into the heavy chains and falling sparks of the industrial landscape of the Black Country, dominated by a grotesque factory foreman and women whose sharp elbows and quick marching steps demonstrate how invaluable they’ve been to the country while the men are gone.
Throughout, it looks spectacular. Moi Tran’s sets and Richard Gellar’s costumes conjure scene after striking scene, and Pouffer is good at setting Rambert’s superb dancers swooping across a landscape, their supple bodies stretching and folding in sharp unison. There’s wonderful (though very loud) music from a live band. There are shimmering dancing girls in gold beads and police dogs in brown leather. There’s also a smart routine to Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand, one of the many familiar songs that Roman GianArthur weaves into his atmospheric and powerful score.
But at a basic storytelling level the piece starts to falter. Although advertised as a prequel, the plot is essentially (like series one) about Tommy’s relationship with the mysterious Grace, now a nightclub singer, who emerges in slinky green velvet against a barrage of orange light. Naya Lovell moves with silky, enticing assurance and you long to see the duet where she and Tommy (a dynamic Guillaume Quéau) fall for one another.
But that key dramatic moment is rushed and the subsequent pell-mell plotting that involves double cross, reconciliation and death feels overhasty and confused. By act two, Pouffer and Steven Knight (the TV series creator, who is credited as writer here) have plunged into abstractions of depression and despair. The expression of this includes an interminable opium den scene, with women in gold headdresses stroking their hair.
Such decisions are doubly peculiar because the one quality in Peaky Blinders that really does lend it to dance in the first place is the strength of its characters, particularly its ferocious women. Polly (a swaggering Simone Damberg Würtz) is wasted even as the voice of the late Helen McCrory reminds you how definitive she was; rich personalities such as Ada and Arthur are sinecures. All the dancers, as always, perform with precision and considerable style. They outshine the pyrotechnics, but even they can’t bring this inert concept to proper life.
Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby tours until 27 May
