Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell – Sadler’s Wells and Touring

Andrew Monaghan and Liam Mower in Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell at Sadler’s Wells, London and Touring. Picture: Johan Persson

Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell was reviewed at Sadler’s Wells, London where it continues until 21 June 2025. The tour continues until 4 October 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Matthew Bourne’s brand of ‘dance theatre’ is characterised by his blend of music, movement and drama that’s imbued with sweepingly cinematic qualities. In The Midnight Bell (first performed in 2021), he adapts the works of Patrick Hamilton (1904-62), the brilliant writer and long-term alcoholic who chronicled the seedy side of interwar London (the flipside of Noel Coward’s rarified society), creating a very adult emotional and sexual panorama around the fringes of Fitzrovia, Soho and Earl’s Court.

While Hamilton is by no means obscure, he’s perhaps not especially widely read. I came to the production as an admirer of his work, though far from an expert; however, no prior knowledge is required and might, in fact, be a good thing (there’s no synopsis in the programme, suggesting that the emotion the piece elicits is more important than plot specifics). The piece comprises multiple interconnected relationships and character archetypes from various works, including Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, all of which have chronic loneliness at their core.

Lez Brotherston’s design evokes a sooty London, set about 20 years on from Mary Poppins and rather less wholesome, filled with boarding houses, fleapit cinemas and Lyons Corner Houses (so tempting to romanticise now that such things no longer exist) that are represented by overheard signage and props. Paule Constable’s lighting evokes a never-ending London fog and the precise cuts of 1930s fashions are elegantly modified for fluidity of movement. Bourne’s choreography is characterised by sinewy extensions and intertwined limbs that straddle a fine line between sensual and seedy.

The excellent original score by Terry Davies is bluesy and cinematic and filled with longing. There are also numerous interludes in which the characters act out their fantasies Dennis Potter-style by miming to crackling records featuring songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin crooned plummily by the likes of Al Bowlly and Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, an escape from the narrowness of their down-at-heel existences.

The plot of Hangover Square could be a full-length dance piece in its own right and the way in which tragic schizophrenic George Harvey Bone is portrayed here as an older man (Alan Vincent) is a touch jarring. His victim Netta Longdon (Daisy May Kemp), an aspiring starlet with no talent or work ethic, isn’t as breathtakingly cruel as she is on the page but she does cut a coolly elegant presence in slacks and a beret.

The most moving relationship depicted is the semi-clandestine one between a police officer (Andrew Monaghan) and a chorus boy (Liam Mower) that develops through small, tender gestures and culminates in a pas de deux to the Gershwins’ ‘The Man I Love’. There’s also an understated poignancy to reserved barmaid Ella (Bryony Pennington) who is courted by Mr Eccles (Reece Causton), a man she doesn’t love but might be her last chance.

Michela Meazza is a highlight as tweedy spinster Miss Roach who is deceived by a bounder (Glenn Graham) who stuffs her pearl necklace in his suspenders when her back his turned, yet she’s no hapless victim and is clearly aware of the risks she’s taking. There’s a deeply sensual side to her character waiting to emerge – at a film showing, she unleashes her inner silent film vamp when she morphs into a Pola Negri type.

Bourne continues to set the bar remarkably high with each production. His name has the power to sell unfamiliar material and hopefully the arresting spectacle that is The Midnight Bell will encourage theatregoers to try or revisit Hamilton’s books and marvel at his sentences, every one as specific as each gesture of Bourne’s choreography.

Julia Rank