Peaky Blinders – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Attention to detail is powerful and Rambert hits the right note from the get-go. Ushers dressed in waistcoats and peaked caps direct the audience. The request to turn off your mobile could be termed menacing. Even the coasters for your interval drink remind you the venue is under new management by order of the Peaky Blinders – the now famous fictional Shelby family, created by Steven Kinght, CBE, who claw their way up from street hoodlums to legitimate business owners in early twentieth century Birmingham. 

The special effects (Filipe J Carvalho), especially the burning barge are bold, unapologetic, theatrical: awesome. And so apt. Peaky Blinders wins at story-telling because it’s “in your face” yet the brushstrokes of anguish and wounds that seep from the past into the present are central to our sympathy for such callous characters. Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby is portrayed with sensitivity and power by Guillaume Quéau. Quéau channels Tommy’s strategic mind with naturalism. He communicates his intermal world through a glance, twitch and contortion of his body. He is a beautiful man. He is a superb athlete. He is a commanding dancer.  Grace Burgess, Shelby’s beautiful, doomed and deceitful lover, is played equally as convincingly by Naya Lovell. They are the perfect tragic fit. As for the rest of the family – go see for yourself. Rambert has cast well … and dressed their cast well (Richard Gellar).

The set (Moi Tran) creates a pitch-perfect mood; the trench ingenious – it never leaves the stage. Dancers work around it, hopping over it, sinking into it. Thus, the terror and pain of war seeps into the fabric of post-war Birmingham. Moreover, the unexpected interaction with the audience is perfect, reflecting how the innocent bystander is dragged into violence, both in the Great War – young men the pawns on The Front while Generals smoke cigars, safe in their War Offices far from The Front – and in Birmingham where the Peaky Blinders run the show and they coldly strike fear into anyone who stands in their way.

The music is outstanding (Roman GianArthur). Just three men (The Last Morrell, James Douglas and Yaron Engler) carry a cast of nineteen. They deliver an inescapable, intense, passionate, stoked-up soundscape. They grab the auditorium and they never let it go.  The guitar squeezes our nerves, the drum crushes and expands the human heartbeat while the cello crumples our souls. Add voices and its magic. Invoke precise, dynamic athleticism – all elbows and jutting jaws in a dark, moody atmosphere – and you have escapism, beauty, awe and raw humanity delivered on a plate. The edgy, confident, aggressive Shelby family are there in all their brutality and strength and in their frailty. The episodes of fluid vulnerability are beautifully rendered.

Where to look – that is the dilemma. So many dancers of perfection. So much enticing, intriguing choreography (Benoit Swan Pouffer). The performers sink into, explode from and command a response. The first half is absolutely engrossing; the second half less so. Having said that, the conceptualisation of the opium den is sheer brilliance: the lighting, the material and the poignancy are captivating.

I loved it. A cynic might say it’s a marketing man’s dream and a ploy to appeal to the masses. I say, yes to that, and all hail to the masses. If this production attracts more people to the power and beauty of dance: all hail Rambert and Peaky Blinders. It is a genius production.

Edinburgh Festival Theatre until 4th March 2023, thereafter Salford, Cardiff, Plymouth, Birmingham.

Reviewer: Kathleen Mansfield

Reviewed: 28th February 2022

North West End UK Rating: ★★★★★