‘Navigating the shark-infested waters of their local‘
There is something truly idiosyncratic about the British pub, dare I go further, the London pub. The Italian osteria or Greek taverna doesn’t have quite the same blend of comfort and rowdiness, that distinctive smell or pint-dulled tang that settles at midnight. So, when I clocked a new(ish) Matthew Bourne set in one of my favourite places on earth, I swung at the opportunity.
However, I warn: this isn’t necessarily a celebration of your local Wetherspoons or a boon to the hospitality industry, despite it being birthed in 2021 as part a response to the pandemic. No, this is a homogenising of the English “connoisseur of alcoholic behaviour,” Patrick Hamilton. His 1930s/40s novels are drab, satirical explorations of obsession, loneliness, and yes—dipsomania. Set in and around Soho and Fitzrovia (my own stomping ground), this is by no means a happy, but a very real world of squandered dreams.
Bourne is no stranger to tackling worlds where ballet normally wouldn’t venture, but this is certainly the murkiest and most down-at-heel. Lez Brotherston’s set is pains, street signs, neons, and railings all swinging on and out like the doors of the eponymous pub where most of the action happens. His costumes are the perfect blend of mothballed glamour, tight tweeds, and voluminous flannels. In tandem with Paule Constable’s shifting light stages, we get the fog, the muck, the early morning blasting hangover into the eyes of our characters, a world both vintage and funnily familiar to us modern Londoners.
Blending characters from a range of Hamilton’s work, Daisy May Kemp is beret and red-lipped-up as Hangover Square’s fish-hearted female lead, Netta. She slinks and sulks marvellously, with Alan Vincent as her lumbering Romeo – doomed to be abused by her metaphorical and literal heeled boot on his neck. Miss Roach is given fragile, flinty strength by Michela Meazza, and an added gay storyline with Liam Mower and Andrew Monaghan ensures that the taboo subject of homosexuality, left out of Hamilton’s novels, is given its rightful, if bush-fumbling, reality.
The dancers swagger, wrestle over one another, swing pints and sozzle, limbs slack then tight as they navigate the shark-infested waters of their local. The danceification (a word?) of drunkenness throughout is impressive, and the various sex scenes retain Hamilton’s cynical sense of fun, along with the gritty reality about these snatched assignations.
The second act drags, however, as more narrative requirements force the dancers into my least favourite pantomime of conversation. Terry Davies’s score has flashes of contemporary songs but introduces a rather odd folky moaning that feels a little too on-the-nose for a piece about… loneliness. Lip-sync sections are static and detract from much of the gripping choreography happening between these pauses.
Yet the sex, sleaze, and sadness of his novels and their period are conjured up well. Extending a bit past its shelf life, we nevertheless feel like we understand the time of stockings and endless Gin and Frenchs. Pouring out into the buzzing night, it seems a race to the closest pub, thankfully, the Shakespeare’s Head is a proper old boozer, just around the corner from the theatre, and heaving, as it should be. Cheers and then some!
Grab a ticket, There still time, click HERE!