The Midnight Bell

Matthew Bourne will forever be associated with his gender realignment of Swan Lake, but while he's had a crack at other classic ballets before and since, these have been outnumbered by adaptations of books and films, with original scores provided by contemporary collaborators rather than sourced from the past. Whether it's a William Golding novel or a Powell and Pressberger film, the narrative of the original provides the backbone for Bourne's reimagining, which is otherwise an original work. The Midnight Bell takes this one step further. Although notionally based on Patrick Hamilton’s novel of that name, it's closer in spirit to the overlapping stories of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, a trilogy of which the Midnight Bell is one part. So we get to see Bob, infatuated with the prostitute Jenny, while Ella's unrequited love for him goes unnoticed. But we also witness, from The Plains of Cement, the advances made towards her by Mr Eccles, and her chilling acceptance of his marriage proposal.

Bourne then goes further still, not content with just refashioning the Midnight Bell Trilogy. George Harvey Bone, the disturbed fantasist from Hangover Square is another patron of the Midnight Bell Pub, obsessed with the actress Netta Longdon. Mrs Roach, patron of the adjacent tearooms, is the lonely spinster from Slaves of Solitude, cruelly manipulated by Ernest Gorse from The West Pier. Thrown into the mix are Albert and Frank, inventions of Bourne and deftly integrated into Hamilton’s world. Representing the love that dare not speak its name, even in Hamilton’s bold narratives, they are the last ingredient in a heady cocktail of pub life that mixes the novelist's nihilistic vision with Bourne's retrospective insights.

How much of this comes across through the medium of dance is moot. A solid working knowledge of Hamilton’s novels would certainly have helped make sense of the overlapping storylines portrayed, which are achieved with varying degrees of success. Bob's infatuation with Jenny feels central to the work - perhaps deliberately so given the autobiographical nature of this thread - and the performances of Dominic North and Hannah Kremer are among the most memorable of the evening. Less successfully realised is Danny Reubens's George Harvey Bone, whose identity I only clocked at the very end of the performance, while Cordelia Braithwaite's under developed Netta Longdon seemed little more than an object of desire, rather than a character herself. To be clear, this wasn't the fault of the uniformly excellent ensemble, but rather an overly ambitious attempt to squeeze as many characters in as possible, without them necessarily earning their place. I was reminded of the novels of Kim Newman, who enjoys cross-pollinating his stories with characters from other books (Ernest Gorse pops up in one, I seem to remember) which is great fun if you get the reference, underwhelming if you don't. I think it telling that, having unshackled Michela Meazza’s Miss Roach and Glenn Graham’s Gorse from Hamilton’s text, Bourne was able to have so much more fun with them. It is surely also significant that the most coherent subplot of the evening was the love affair between Edwin Ray’s Frank and Liam Mower’s Albert, sprung from Bourne's imagination, rather than wrestled from the texts.

This would have mattered less, had dance featured more prominently. There were isolated set pieces of breath-taking virtuosity featuring the whole company, and some lovely, more intimate couples dancing, but too often the performers limited themselves to heightened movement. To do otherwise, given the narrative, would have arguably been inappropriate but it shackled the dancers I had come to see do their stuff. Instead, we were given a sprinkling of contemporary songs, lip synced by a cast member. Too obviously a steal from Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, this invited unfavourable comparison with Potter's masterpiece.

To put these reservations into perspective, I should add that the production values of The Midnight Bell were superb. Lez Brotherston's set and costume design was an inventive delight. I would judge Terry Davies's original composition to be his finest collaboration with Bourne to date. The performances were faultless. This was a delightful spectacle that brought the stage to life. It was a clever, complex work and one I can appreciate in hindsight, even if I didn't fully appreciate it in the moment. A second viewing would, I am sure, add so much more to an understanding of a work that riffs off of novels that, frankly, have largely fallen into obscurity. I'm now inclined to go seek them out, so have Matthew Bourne to thank for that. But for me his assertion that "dance can tackle, in-depth, unconventional and complex relationships" begs more questions than answers. If I can’t fully understand the narrative on stage without doing my homework, then can the work truly be wholly successful? Bluntly put, is the Midnight Bell just a bit too clever for its own good?