Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell – intoxicated tales from darkest Soho

Less well-known than such acclaimed Matthew Bourne works as Swan Lake, Edward Scissorhands and The Car Man, The Midnight Bell is no less sublime. He's a master storyteller whose choreography expertly conveys narrative, drama, wit and emotion, and he and his extraordinarily gifted New Adventures company of dancers are operating at the top of their game here.

Bourne is telling not one story but several – culled from the work of English playwright and novelist Patrick Hamilton, whose output from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s has largely been overshadowed by such contemporary admirers as JB Priestley and Graham Greene.

As Bourne notes in the programme, Hamilton (who gained recognition for his plays Rope and Gas Light) was the anti-Noël Coward – fascinated, in his books rather than in his stage scripts, not by glamour and high society but by working class waifs and strays.

Drawing from Hamilton’s books or taking inspiration from them, the show revolves around a disparate bunch of characters as they frequent London pub The Midnight Bell and flit in and out of a nearby hotel, dancehall, cinema and members’ club across two nights sometime in the 1930s.

They include bar staff, hookers, young lovers both straight and gay, an obsessive older gentlemen and a lonely spinster.

And they are all brought to life by performers whose prowess is matched by an astonishing ability to fully flesh out characters without words beyond the lyrics they occasionally mime to, Pennies From Heaven style, from popular songs of the time.

Lez Brotherston’s costumes clue us in to profession and status, as his fluid set deftly whisks us between locations for courtships, seductions and liaisons both drunken and (for gay men in interwar times) dangerous. Paule Constable’s lighting is magnificently moody, as is Terry Davies’ music.

Currently touring the country, these “intoxicated tales from darkest Soho” offer a feast for the senses. It’s a slighter piece than Bourne’s more famed productions and, by the very nature of its subject matter, rather dour at times. But it’s entrancing, evocative and ultimately deeply moving.