MATTHEW Bourne, the inspired creator of the all-male Swan Lake, and many other dance theatre pieces, scored another hit and won more awards with his 2021 production, The Midnight Bell, which comes to the Theatre Royal Bath from Tuesday 20th to Saturday 24th May, as part of a countrywide tour.

His company, New Adventures, makes a welcome return to Bath with these glamorous, funny, bitter and romantic tales from darkest Soho. The story is inspired by the work of English novelist Patrick Hamilton, who is best-known for his thriller, Gaslight, which gave the world a word for dangerous controlling behaviour and has been successfully filmed and adapted for the stage, as well as Rope, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky and Hangover Square. He created some of the most authentic fiction of his era – stories that came from years of social interactions with the working man and woman at his favourite location, the London pub.

In 1930s London, ordinary people emerge from cheap boarding houses nightly to pour out their passions, hopes and dreams in the pubs and fog-bound streets of Soho and Fitzrovia. Step inside The Midnight Bell, a tavern where the people of one particular lonely-hearts club gather to play out their lovelorn affairs, bitter comedies of longing, frustration, betrayal and redemption.

The cast features 14 of New Adventures’ finest actor/dancers: Cordelia Braithwaite, Reece Causton, Glenn Graham, Daisy May Kemp, Hannah Kremer, Michela Meazza, Andy Monaghan, Liam Mower, Dominic North, Bryony Pennington, Edwin Ray, Danny Reubens, Ashley Shaw and Alan Vincent. For nearly 30 years, these dancers have between them performed leading roles to critical acclaim in every production in Matthew Bourne’s repertoire, in the UK and internationally.

Photographs by Johan Persson