Broken-hearted boozers and half-cut romantics are always welcome in The Midnight Bell. A pub in unglamorous 1930s London, it hosts dire assignations and unwise couplings in Matthew Bourne’s splendidly seedy dance drama.
First seen in 2021, the show is inspired by the anguished mid-century London novels of Patrick Hamilton: steeped in disappointment, failure and quantities of alcohol. These lonely Londoners can’t bear too much reality, so they drink. A glug to get you up in the morning, a slug to aid the afternoon, a snifter to ease into the evening. Then it’s down the pub and blotto all the way to bedtime. Secretaries and street walkers, gigolos and chorus boys – all knock it back until life becomes an acceptable blur.
Even Terry Davies’ score sounds squiffy, weaving in period recordings of winsome ballads and sob-sister laments to which dancers lip synch. Behind them, bedsitter lights gleam through fog-smeared Fitzrovia.
The plot doesn’t so much unfold as eke out the time to last orders. Bourne’s piece peers into characters’ aching hearts. Although some are less period types than throwbacks (the spinster, the tart, the nutter), a vivid cast adds depth. They trace a series of lingering glances and questionable romances, mostly mistaking chilly transactions for true love.
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Tweed-suited, tight-buttoned Michela Meazza is all rebarbative angles – discreetly sozzled but appalled by the company she’s keeping. Glenn Graham’s scoundrel waggles his pelvis in her direction then filches money from her purse. They end up in the heart-stopping shame of a seedy hotel, where Graham reveals thoroughly caddish sock suspenders.
For two chaps (Liam Mower and Andrew Monaghan), furtive peeks lead to horndog swoon, with the possibility of something more – until Mower plants a kiss, which is wiped away like an insult. They slip through each other’s arms like lovelorn mackerel. George Bone (from Hamilton’s Hangover Square) is blearily devoted to a taunting actress. Daisy May Kemp plays her in a beret and a sneer while Alan Vincent flounders abjectly at her feet. His sadsack Bone is like a teddy with the stuffing pouring out.
Bourne’s mature stage mastery produces rich ensembles and searing double-focus scenes. He’ll spin two ill-fitting couples around the same loveless bed, one pumping, one slumping. Paule Constable’s lighting shifts on a sixpence from hopeful glow to the cold grey of last orders. A snog may briefly change the world – but dreams can also fold, so quickly.
The choreography shows how love leaves characters butterflied and spatchcocked. Bodies fold and warp around each other. There’s a flickering dance hall tango, an unwelcome proposal in a Lyons Corner House, a desolate pub Christmas. Among a strong cast, Mower, Meazza and Vincent are outstandingly, if wordlessly, eloquent – you’d swear they were speaking.
Sadler’s Wells, to June 21; new-adventures.net/the-midnight-bell
