FringeReview UK 2026
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
Ashley Cooke for Troupe
Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Large Studio, Borough
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Patrick Hamilton Trilogy is presented by Troupe, most recently celebrated for their RSC/Park Forsyte Saga, and with the same sweep and verve. Adapted by Simon Reade, and premiered at Southwark Playhouse’s Borough Large Studio it’s directed by Matthew Iliffe for Troupe Theatre till October 17.
Sublimely realised in sleaze by the predominantly youthful company led by the magisterial Michael Maloney. A must-see.
Review
The Midnight Bell pub off the Euston Road. A barman wakes after a dream of ten weeks. He’s not the only one. The trilogy of Patrick Hamilton novels is quite familiar, adapted by the BBC in 2005. Many will know of Matthew Bourne’s ballet The Midnight Bell based on several novels. But here’s just the original three, presented by Troupe, most recently celebrated for their RSC/Park Forsyte Saga, and with the same sweep and verve. Premiered at Southwark Playhouse’s Borough Large Studio it’s directed by Matthew Iliffe for Troupe Theatre till October 17.
Stage adaptations can often prove deadly (who needs them?), but with Troupe they always take wing. Simon Reade has freshly adapted Hamilton’s classic trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. It comprises his 1929 The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934). He’s trimmed back characters so the six actors, with only one multi-roling, arise distinct. Overall the trilogy might take a name Hamilton used for a 1947 novel, Slaves of Solitude. Loneliness and quiet desperation seep through a story itself dipping into the Depression. Things will only get worse.
Reade’s seamlessly stitched the trilogy so emphasis falls on each of the three principal characters, mostly skeined together. Framing an opening that signals much in advance, it slants an inevitability that mightn’t be intended by Hamilton, but which works here. Reade’s set it mainly between September-December 1929 (referencing historical markers) with a central flashback story of three years early for Jenny. There’s an opening prelude around Christmas 1929 with Jenny Maple (Yanexi Enriquez) having stood up a boyfriend and negotiating with potential customer George Perry (Alex Bhat) who has no recognition of how three years ago he changed her life.
It swiftly moves back ten weeks. Ella Dawson (a radiant Rosalind Lailey) and Bob (Jordan Scowen: bright, idealistic, with a touch of reserve and hesitation) work at The Midnight Bell. Bob is the most autobiographical character Hamilton ever wrote and Scowen realises some of his inner fastidiousness: skewered by desire and a fiction-making ability turned the wrong way. His Bob’s a former sailor who wants to write and is reading Decline and Fall. Ella’s secretly in love with Bob but doesn’t declare it. They’re soon joined by regulars who’ll shape their future. Lailey and Scowen set up an asymetric rapport, one which you feel could blossom.
That’s nipped with the arrival of Jenny Maple (Enriquez, mixing professional chat-up “dear” with shafts of sincerity) and the young woman who encouraged her in her profession: Prunella (Lucy Gray also Jenny’s Landlady and a Waitress). As soon as they fetch up, Bob’s entranced by Jenny and impulsively lends then gives her an amount. Ella sees most of this and Lailey registers mute reproach.
Another barfly is ageing Ernest Eccles, realised with a mix of dated charm, irascibility and patronising solicitude by Michael Maloney. He asks Ella out. She’d already accepted Bob’s suggestion of the cinema, but Bob happily releases her from that on her Thursday off. In an exquisitely squirmy series of encounters, Lailey’s painfully polite with Maloney’s lonely, elderly but delusional Ernest, who somehow feels he’s doing Ella a favour. Despite his loneliness Ernest in making his gambit does so deluded by a sense of class superiority and entitled stooping.
Maloney’s gestures are often half-formed, swallowed back and abrupt: he tilts his hat on occasion. He exudes everywhere a seedy despair even being sprightly with an umbrella or a bunch of yellow flowers. Lailey shows with a look just how Ella is besieged: her resources baffled with gentility. Yet despite Ella’s possible escape into a loveless marriage, she holds back.
In the middle section (The Siege of Pleasure) the emphasis is on Jenny three years earlier around the time of the 1926 General Strike (the use of newspapers never overdone). Gray’s pert sharp-tongued Prunella has been dismissed from the factory she’s worked in and quickly took to sex-working. Jenny though has secured a well-paid lady’s maid position. They encounter youthful roué George Perry (Bhat, oleaginous with lustful indifference) who clearly favours innocent Jenny. Gray’s good at mixing wry affection with someone who’d not be displeased to take hoity Jenny down a peg.
There’s shadows here of class war. As Ernes asserts his superiority over Ella, Pru wants to being down “respectable” Jenny. And George thinks that’s all working-class women are for. The original shades more of this, and more layers of moral disgust in Bob. There’s enough flickered through in Reade’s adaptation to hint at it.
George and Pru encourage Jenny’s initiation into drink. After a night which involves his car knocking down a cyclist, things spiral. It’s in Bhat’s and (to a degree) Gray’s debauched grooming of Enriquez’ dazed Jenny, that Hamilton depicts such casual flicks of mastery. Bhat’s predatory sadism in George is so practised that his flicker of apparent kindness disorient Enriquez’ Jenny. Though Enriquez shows something in Jenny too that isn’t unwilling; it comes down to her being pushed from Guinness to a short. Yet her concern about the cyclist, her desire to keep her job shows someone on a knife-edge. She could pull away.
Shadowing Jenny’s later self, Enriquez shows the pre-Lapserian Jenny as someone fundamentally warm and (understandably) seduced by knowledge of her own appeal, and awakening. But it’s a brutalizing, defining one. As Jenny declares though, every man but Bob has let her down. Enriquez never sentimentalises Jenny’s plight. Given a chance, Jenny makes her own chaos make her choice.
The last scenes return to 1929 and the denouement, with a final encounter between Ella and Bob.
Nothing distracts from the storytelling over two hours five minutes. Sam Spencer-Lane’s movement sweeps the characters round the Borough’s Large Studio like a ballroom, set in the round. Ellie Wintour’s set comprises a few props (cabinets and glasses star) with a descending beam that operates as a bar. There’s emphasis on sharp period costumes. Indeed it’s designed so the real set is Alex Musgrave’s lighting, foggily pricked with streetlamps. You’d think they were patented by Hamilton, so emblematic are they in his work. It’s all punctuated discreetly with Elizabeth Purnell’s mix of realist sound, period songs and ambient composition.
At two hours five, perhaps this fleet dramatisation doesn’t plumb the depths it might were it to allow 15 or so minutes more to seep in from the darkness. Nevertheless, it’s a first-rate dramatization for the most part, and ideal as a lucid introduction to Hamilton’s still miserably underrated world. It’s sublimely realised in sleaze too by the predominantly youthful company led by the magisterial Maloney, fresh out of his latest Poirrot. A must-see.
Emily Beck sometimes features as cover/ensemble.
Intimacy Director Jess Tucker-Boyd, Costume Supervisor Alice Stokoe, Stage Manager Lois Sime, ASM Elysia Beaumont, Assistant Director Amber Charlie Conroy, Production Manager Lewis Champney for eStage, PR Kate Morley, Marketing Mobius Industries.
