Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell – Liverpool Playhouse

T.S. Eliot said that poetry can communicate before it is understood. The Midnight Bell is poetry in motion – not so much a linear tale as an evocation of a time and place, where love stories from the back streets of inter-war London swirl, intersecting and cross-referencing, before resolving into a tableau.

Born in Covid and taking inspiration from the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky novels of Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell takes its name from a downtown pub, the narrative hub, where the small-time romances of chancers and spinsters alike play out.

Certainly, there is something very Prufrockian about Lez Brotherston’s set, reminiscent of the “muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” of Eliot’s antihero. The inside of a Soho boozer is wonderfully summoned by such quotidian props as chairs and tables and mops, the outside framed by hanging signs, phone boxes and park benches. And it’s all lit by a flickering yellow gaslight, perhaps as visual nod to Hamilton’s most famous work, Gas Light. 

Inspired by Hamilton’s stories of ordinary folk, Bourne has nevertheless produced something extraordinary. At first it almost feels as though there is too much to take in, as a multitude of characters enact a variety of interactions and love is suggested in all its guises – unrequited, unspoken, unspeakable; sometimes cynical, sometimes transactional – simultaneously and without words. If your eye lingers on one couple, are you missing something important elsewhere on the stage? But such is the cleverness of the choreography that Bourne directs your gaze to the right place at the right time. And this silent hurricane of action allows the love stories to visually echo and comment upon each other at once, which alchemy is more akin to poetry than any other art form. A single bed doubles as the centre of action for two couples duetting on stage at the same time, allowing us to contrast these relationships in real time.

There is, perhaps inevitably without dialogue, a sense of suggestion rather than exposition but this allows the audience member to tell themselves the story, to fill out the characters and, to some extent, decide their endings. But all the clues are there, from the music, a blend of ditties from the thirties and the recurrent siren-like female voice to the incidental sounds of urban pigeons and a particular kind of inter-war chic. But it is the performers who are the real magicians. Bourne’s mission at audition was to find dancers who can also act, who can tell a story. Amongst a cast of superlative communicators, Michela Meazza’s lonely spinster was the standout, emotions from shy reserve to coy acceptance and painful hope through to hopeless pain chase across her face with raw credibility in an outstanding performance.

Reviewer: Miranda Green

Reviewed: 16^th September 2025

North West End UK Rating: