Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell – Review – Sheffield Lyceum
By Clare Jenkins, September 2025
A Soho pub in the 1930s. Outside, the fog swirls as an exotically dressed prostitute waits under a gas lamp for her next customer. Inside, the drink flows and the lights flicker. At one table, an upright, uptight woman surreptitiously checks her make-up in a mirror. At another, a darkly bearded man glowers at his date as she flirts with a sharp-suited salesman. A West End chorus boy slouches at the bar, furtively eyeing up another man.
Welcome to The Midnight Bell, Matthew Bourne’s loose adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. Hamilton, who died in 1962, knew a thing of two about the seedier side of London life. An alcoholic himself, he was a regular in Soho pubs and fell in love with a prostitute (a relationship which, like his two marriages, didn’t last).
“Atmospherically pitch-perfect”
In this revived 2021 production, Bourne and his ten-strong ensemble of New Adventures actor-dancers create not so much a ballet as an impressionistic tapestry of love, loss and loneliness. There are no big events, no – I was going to say climaxes, but in fact there are two of those, courtesy of the single bed in the cheap boarding-house where people pay to consummate their passions.
Instead, there’s a compelling, if occasionally puzzling, interweaving of relationships, the focus sometimes on one particular mini-drama, sometimes dissolving into a swirl of overlapping emotions. A series of vignettes, in other words, creating their own narrative of the secret lives of not-so-secret drinkers, with all their disappointments and disillusionments.
Lez Brotherston’s constantly shifting set is – like Paule Constable’s lighting – atmospherically pitch-perfect: a backdrop of smoking London chimneys, grimy windows, the edginess of a shadowy London square, a nicotine-stained pub interior, a flashing neon ‘Rooms’ sign, stained glass pub windows, the hint of a red telephone box.
“Caddish lover”
As ever, Bourne’s love of film influences the staging. There’s a hint of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for instance, in Michela Meazza’s lonely spinster as she dreams of being half of a couple; a touch of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Will Bozier’s brooding, potentially violent, spurned lover. And there’s more than a dash of Grand Hotel, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonely Hearts, whether it’s in Hannah Kremer’s innocent barmaid surrendering to an elderly admirer (Reece Causton) or Meazza clutching her throat when she realises her caddish lover (Edwin Ray) has stolen her pearls to give to Cordelia Braithwaite’s disdainful actress.
Composer Terry Davies’ sultry score is smokily bluesy but ranking up the jazz element at moments of tension or crisis. Added into the mix is Paul Groothuis’s sound design of trams, pigeons flapping, footsteps, a dog barking, footsteps – and a host of popular songs of the times, lip-synched by the dancers: ‘Maybe I Love You Too Much’ (Dominic North as the cheery young barman in love with Ashley Shaw’s sex worker); Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ (as the closet gays, danced by Liam Mower and Andy Monaghan, dance sinuously round each other); ‘Guilty of Loving You’…
“Worlds of emotion”
If at times the drama occasionally descends into pastiche, and if at others it seems to take precedence over the dance, the movement is always fluid, well-paced and precise, as seemingly effortless as in all Bourne’s productions. The dancers ebb and flow seamlessly around each other, whether dancing solo, or romantically entangled (physically as well as psychologically) – or even when the whole ensemble engage in a rewind scene, reversing the movements they’ve just made.
There are touching moments and moments of humour – as when the strutting cad undresses to reveal vest, long johns, socks and garters. Throughout, the smallest of gestures (a shrug, a wink) and the slightest of facial expressions (a quick glance towards or away) communicate whole worlds of emotion.
Ultimately, as the final song asks, ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ Or, as Eleanor Rigby was to sing three decades later, ‘All the lonely people, where do they all belong?”
In The Midnight Bell, that’s where.
‘Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell’ is at the Sheffield Lyceum until Saturday 27th Sept, then at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford from Tuesday 30th to Sat 4th October
Clare’s dream is to live in a hotel suite, safe from the bother of boiler breakdowns and crashing computers. In fact, thanks to her husband Stephen McClarence’s work as a national newspaper travel writer, she’s been lucky enough to stay at hotels and eat in restaurants across the UK and abroad – and has loved (nearly) every minute. As a journalist herself, she’s made hundreds of features and documentaries for Radio 4, including interviews with many actors and writers. She’s also a former theatre reviewer for The Stage magazine, and co-author of Teatime at Peggy’s: A Glimpse of Anglo-India.
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