REVIEW: The Midnight Bell, Sadler’s Wells (2025)

Dance Reflections in a 1930s Soho Pub

“Cooshay avec ma sirswar!”

Jenny

It is a marriage made in Heaven: Matthew Bourne’s innovative choreography and Patrick Hamilton’s novels imbued with alcohol and 1930s London. Hamilton wrote to his brother Bruce in 1928, that the observation needed for this novel, The Midnight Bell presents “a miraculous opportunity for reaping my wild oats! If ever a man knew the atmosphere and life and ethics of these places it’s me.” So the dance production is set in a pub in Fitzrovia, to the west of Tottenham Court Road in darkest Soho.

The main characters are Bob the Barman (Dominic North). All dancers named are those seen on the press night. Bob falls for Jenny Maple, a young blonde prostitute (Ashley Shaw). Seated in the pub is Miss Roach (Michela Meazza) the lonely, elderly spinster with a slowly drunk gin. Outside we can see the lit windows of surrounding buildings through the yellow London smog lit by Paule Constable.

Inside the pub the dancers move the configuration of round tables and chairs, clearing the floor space for mopping the floor at the end of a shift. So the regular routines of the pub become an artistic coda as the customers leave. These pubs would be open from 3pm to closing time and some customers would only move from their seats to re-order drinks. The men were often business men who concluded all their business in the mornings leaving their afternoons and evenings free.

It is into this hypnotic but busy atmosphere that Matthew Bourne inserts the emotion of the often lonely and isolated lives created by his dancers. There are the characters, a cad, handsome Ernest Ralph Gorse (Glenn Graham) a predatory man who targets Miss Roach, Netta Longdon (Daisy May Kemp) an out of work actress, and Ella (Bryony Pennington) a barmaid helping Bob run the pub.

Mr Eccles (Reece Causton) is a regular customer, people don’t know his first name. George Harvey Bone (Alan Vincent) is described as a tortured romantic. He wears a beret and a scarf. We know that he suffers from schizophrenia. Two new characters have been inserted by Matthew Bourne, Frank (Andrew Monaghan) and Albert a West End Chorus Boy (Liam Mower) who will embark on a gay relationship.

We will follow some customers after the pub to the hotel, to rooms which were doss houses, some for a dance of passion or sleeping alone. There is so much smoking and it is beautiful to look at, the hand holding the cigarette, expressive and lyrical. There are drums for a sex scene. Throughout there are evocative songs of the era, from Hoagy Carmichael, the Gershwins and Irving Berlin. Liz Brotherston’s sets and costumes are exemplary.

I was blown away by the atmosphere, the play without words or accents and yet being immersed in another era with the same issues of lovelessness and loneliness as today. Bourne’s lightness of touch allows us to laugh in places. The Midnight Bell is a dance production that fires the imagination and empathy for its dancers.