IN a recent discussion with a group of young people about the merits of the lyrics in modern pop music compared to those in the 20th century, those of the 1930s were dismissed as having no merit, just cheap romantic nonsense, full of ‘moon and June’ rhymes. A visit to this production where Matthew Bourne and composer Terry Davies incorporate, with Davies’s original music, nine 1930s vocal recordings using the lyrics to enhance the drama and passion in the dance sequences, would give them a very different view of 1930s popular music and lyrics.

We start on an upbeat note with Dominic North as Bob, a sailor at present working as a bar waiter at the Midnight Bell Pub in Soho, miming to Al Bowley’s A Man has His Dreams. The stories, brilliantly adapted in dance from Patrick Hamilton’s  The Midnight Bell, follow the lives of five lonely couples, all seeking love, security and companionship.

Bob is infatuated with Ashley Shaw’s young, as yet not hardened, prostitute, and loved by the inexperienced barmaid Ella(Holly Saw) who in turn is pursued by the elderly customer Mr Eccles (Reece Causton). At first Ella accepts Mr Eccles advances because of the security they offer, but then rejects him, leaving him devastated and lonely.

Equally shattered by rejection is the elderly tortured romantic George Harvey Bone (Danny Reubens) following out-of-work actress Netta (Daisy May Kemp) like a whipped dog, answering her every whim. He is even prepared to accept her flirting with the cheap gigolo Ernest Ralph Gorse, (Glenn Graham), who later gets his come-uppance at the hands of Michela Meazza’s desperately lonely spinster Miss Roach. The lyrics of Guilty, What is This Thing Called Love and Solitude, mimed to the singing of Al Bowley, Leslie A Hutchinson and Arthur Tracy, are used with tremendous imagination for the dancers to not only tell their stories, but to paint painful heartfelt portraits of the characters.

Sexual acts are often coarse or tacky when presented on stage, but with the aid of Elizabeth Welsh singing The Nearness of You, and ‘Hutch’”s The Man I Love, they are a thing of great beauty in the hands of Michela Meazza’s superbly danced Miss Roach, and the burgeoning homosexual love between the pub’s newest customer Frank (Andrew Monaghan) and West End chorus boy Albert (Liam Mower.)

With set and costume designer Lez Brotherston evoking perfect atmospheric sets inside the pub and in the street, enhanced by Paule Constable’s lighting plot, the production never wavers for a moment from its 1930s roots.

And just as firmly set in that period, picking up the intertwining storylines with great clarity, is Matthew Bourne’s fascinatingly imaginative choreography. He shares the credit for this with the original cast – the production was first seen in 2021 and many of that cast are in this production, and who, in dance, mime and as scene changers, demonstrate a wonderful example of teamwork.

If you have a friend who shies away from any form of Dance Theatre, if necessary drag them along to the Theatre Royal, Bath, or later the Hall for Cornwall from 28th to 31st May, or Theatre Royal, Plymouth from 22nd to 26th June, where they will undergo an outstanding and quite unique theatrical experience.

GRP

Photographs by Johan Persson