The Midnight Bell is Matthew Bourne’s bleakest work to date but it’s up there with his best. The mood is fitting given that the source material is the novels of Patrick Hamilton, chronicler of the lonely, needy and seedy in alcohol-soaked 1930s Soho. Turning the likes of Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude into dance is a tall order, the gap between the books’ grim realism and dance theatre’s artifice awkwardly wide, but he pulls it off (if not quite plunging to the dank depths of the originals – you can’t send people home that hopelessly depressed). Rather than staging the novels, Bourne collects Hamilton’s characters, plus a few of his own making, in the smoke-stained pub The Midnight Bell, where they gather in search of a drink and desperate connection.
Their eyes and bodies meet, but their duets are full of resistance too and humiliation is never far away. There’s the fresh-faced barmaid, too polite to extricate herself from an admirer; the spinster attracting the attention of a cad, who thaws her froideur and steals from her purse; there’s the chirpy barman, puppyishly in love with a sex worker (an autobiographical storyline based on Hamilton’s own doomed love affairs); the two men furtively finding each other; and most chillingly, George Harvey Bone (from Hangover Square), a man with schizophrenia who fantasises about strangling the woman who eludes him.
The dancers move in ever-shifting permutations, like chess pieces on a crowded board, artfully skirting out of one another’s way or falling into tense entanglements. The Midnight Bell belongs to the same school as Play Without Words: it’s not the danciest of Bourne’s works but the characters’ physical signatures are clearly defined. It’s all there in their gait, whether the slight stoop of Bone (a very good Richard Winsor, never overegging it), the tightly held body of Miss Roach (Michela Meazza, with plenty of subtlety playing out on her face), or the rubbery bounce of waiter Bob (an endearing Paris Fitzpatrick), optimistically kicking his heels.
Although in a way little happens, the show is well paced, the characters’ small journeys both seismic and insignificant, like most lives. It works because Bourne is all over the small details, from the way Jenny (Bryony Wood) slouches on the bed to the timing of a hiccup. The choreography is tight and the cast are strong. Liam Mower and Andrew Monaghan have the most to explore dance-wise – and emotionally too, navigating a gay relationship on the fringes of acceptability, even to Monaghan’s own character.
The show’s success owes much to the atmosphere created by Bourne’s collaborators: Paul Groothuis’s sound design, the birdsong and footsteps and car engines that make the city hum even in the early hours; and Lez Brotherston’s designs, cleverly shifting to indicate a warren of Soho streets, just a red roof and a receiver to represent a telephone box; all enhanced by Paule Constable’s lighting. Fundamental is Terry Davies’ unusually textured score, which becomes heady and maudlin: the sound of three or four whiskies. In between, the characters lip-sync 1930s songs as monologues addressed to the audience: Leslie Hutchinson’s recording of What Is This Thing Called Love stands out, sounding hollow, mournful and perfectly pitched for this show’s searing portrait of love’s pathetic disappointments.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 9 October. Then touring until 27 November.
