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 sum...
