"Don't You Gentlemen Have Homes To Go To?"
Matthew Bourne's Ballet 'The Midnight Bell' Calls "Time" On A Dying British Subculture
Literary reputations ebb and flow in fascinating ways. The poet Sappho was honoured throughout the ancient world but her work survives only in fragments. Shakespeare has come down to us chiefly because two friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, went to the trouble after his death of gathering as many plays as they could find into a single volume, the First Folio. Jane Austen’s novels were out of print from her 1817 death until 1833 when publisher Richard Bentley speculatively re-issued them in inexpensive, single-volume editions. She was a slow burn and her status as a world-class writer had to wait until the back end of the century.
British novelists Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Hall Caine (1853–1931) and Marie Corelli (1855–1924) were all highly regarded in their day but their Victorian didacticism, moralising and, in Corelli’s case, weird spiritual views did not survive the impact of modernism.
But my favourite tale of literary reputation concerns Victorian humourist Jerome K Jerome. Growing up he aspired to be an intellectual and man of letters, but modest family finances forced him became a hack writer, albeit one who poured his soul into several overwrought novels. Nowadays, we know him mostly for Three Men In A Boat, his mawkish, uneven but ultimately hilarious story of a laddish holiday afloat on the Thames. This is his true slice of literary immortality but he reputedly dashed it off in 72 hours as a commission.
It is through this lens that I view the peculiar career of 20th-century British writer Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962). According to his own account — and it must be borne in mind that he really hated his father — his literary parents, Bernard Hamilton and Olivia Roy, couldn’t reconcile their limited writing-derived income (and talent) with their upper-class social aspirations. Hamilton Snr was a qualified lawyer so the family might have achieved a respectable prosperity. But instead they bestowed on their child an unstable and drink-sotten childhood in a series of London and South Coast boarding houses.
Despite the family’s many sacrifices on the altar of High Art, his mother is remembered chiefly for her novel The Husband Hunter which was made into a film starring the wonderfully named Madge Titheradge in 1920. His father’s proto-science fiction love stories have disappeared almost without trace.
Yet a parent’s disappointed ambition can still act as a powerful spur to achievement in the next generation. Hamilton, raised — however incompetently — in a household which took writing seriously, soon had his own literary life. His first commercial success came in 1929 when his play Rope was staged in the West End and on Broadway. It was taken up by the BBC which was then experimenting with a newfangled medium called ‘radio drama’ and by British director Alfred Hitchcock who made it into a film.
But Hamilton was more than a one-hit wonder. His 1938 stage play Gas Light also followed a trajectory to the West End and Broadway, and was turned into two memorable films. (The first, British, was suppressed by the makers of the second, who didn’t want their big-budget Hollywood melodrama starring Ingrid Bergman to have its thunder stolen. The British version is better, creepier and more psychologically acute than the George Cukor effort and you can find it free on YouTube here.)
At first, Hamilton’s novels did well and some, such as Hangover Square, were also made into films. But by the end of the 1930s the twin evils of alcohol and Marxism, both well-known depressants, were taking their toll on his personal life. The great novels continued — The Slaves of Solitude (1947), Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953) — but after that his writing petered out into wretched unhappiness. He died of liver cirrhosis in the early 1960s, a neglected and under-rated author.
Hamilton had distinguished fans including Graham Greene and Doris Lessing, but nowadays his slim popular reputation rests largely on his invention, in Gas Light, of a heroine who is driven to the edge of madness by the deceptions of her husband-abuser. In this astonishing age of digital smoke and mirrors, the verb to gaslight has attained universal currency, though few have made the link back to Hamilton. Like his more urbane contemporary, the playwright Terence Rattigan (1911-1977), he was a post-War victim of changing cultural fashions as the next generation of writers took centre stage. Like Rattigan, he is too good to hold down indefinitely.
The Midnight Bell is choreographer Matthew Bourne’s homage to one of Britain’s great 20th-century writers. Bourne is best known for reimagining Petipa’s Swan Lake — his muscular version featured an all-male corps de ballet. We are used to the athletic leaps and lifts of the Russian ballet tradition — the great stars, the worker bees, the smaller character roles for ageing members of the company. But The Midnight Bell, Bourne’s 20th work, is very different. Inspired by his reading of multiple Hamilton novels, it’s practically an ensemble piece — one steeped in social realism rather than fairy tales. The name comes from part of Hamilton’s London trilogy 20,000 Streets Under The Sky but Bourne draws in story lines drawn from later works such as Hangover Square and The Slaves Of Solitude to create an intricate and overlapping series of pas de deux for dancers of various ages. They are set against the backdrop of a typical central London pub of the 1930s.
Hamilton, though protected by early financial success from having to work shifts in a post office, is in some ways the British Charles Bukowski. He did work as a barman when young and his subject was the drinking culture of the West End district of Fitzrovia (just north of Soho) and the sad, lonely, misfit demi-mondes who inhabited it — a waiter, a prostitute, a middle-aged spinster, a cad, a barmaid, a resting actress, a chorus boy. All the types which London draws into itself; the people who arrive in the capital to make something of themselves but stay for its blessed anonymity.
This cohort included what we would now term “the gay community” who evaded arrest and the consequent harsh legal penalties via what the programme terms ‘a complex series of coded signs and signals’. Despite some half-hearted critical attempts to recruit Hamilton for the queer people as a repressed homosexual with a mother fixation, this really wasn’t his scene. He’s much more interested in his complex female characters such as the middle-aged spinster Miss Roach.
Bourne, creating the new ballet under lockdown conditions in 2021, takes the bold decision to insert a male-on-male love story into the heart of the action. In context it works perfectly; what Hamilton, though no doubt familiar with Fitzrovia’s homosexual activity, didn’t choose to write about feels like an erasure now.
In this shameless age of glorified fetish, there was something rather sweet about Edwin Ray and Liam Mower’s tentative, and then increasingly physical, courtship. There is lots of sex in this production, just as in the 1930s and 1940s there was rather more actual sex than we like to contemplate in a supposedly more liberated era. (Porn-sick inceldom seems to have become the new normal for Zoomers.) As the cast of lonely misfits seek solace in each other’s bodies the culmulative effect is claustrophobic and hallucinatory. I found it difficult to imagine that, 10 miles down the road in the so-called Metroland of London’s modern outer suburbs (prosperous due to the burgeoning consumer goods and electronics industries even in the 1930s), respectable lifelong alliances were being negotiated on picnic expeditions and at sunshiny tennis club teas.
It is a vanished world now. The demi-monde of Soho and Fitzrovia began to disappear as Central London gentrified. The city is unaffordable for creative artists, many of whom have decamped to Margate, Hastings and even further afield. Small-time con artists, who so fascinated Hamilton, have moved online, as indeed have so many other forms of social activity.
The food offering in pubs has generally improved. At the South London pub where, for a brief period in the 1980s, I pulled pints as a barmaid with a surprising degree of competence, the dining option consisted of a calendar-style cardboard poster behind the bar, from which we had to pull packets of peanuts. This gradually exposed an image of a voluptuous lady in a revealing state of not much on.
And updated licensing laws have stripped so many traditional pub rituals, such as chucking-out time, of their meaning. (Restrictive First World War regulations survived well into my own era. Does anyone else remember the ludicrous procedure of signing up as member of a seedy basement ‘club’ so you could get a late-night drink?)
The elephant in the room is racial diversity. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory estimates that approximately 40% of London’s population is foreign-born now, drawn from a dizzying diversity of races and ethnicities. In the 1930s there would have been a few black jazz musicians in Soho and East Asians in China Town and beyond Wapping. But slightly further north in Fitzrovia Bourne’s all-white cast of pub regulars is probably a reasonably accurate depiction of Hamilton’s world (though reliable statistics for this are surprisingly hard to come for any era before the 1990s).
Whether or not this was Bourne’s intention at the height of the Pandemic, the work now feels steeped in nostalgia for a dying white, British culture, albeit one depicted in its bleakest central London manifestation. The British Election Survey (2016) noted that communities which had experienced declining social capital — “the resource that arises from interpersonal networks and the norms of trust and reciprocity that facilitate social interaction within them” — were more likely to vote Leave in the Brexit Referendum. Traditional pubs, those alternative front parlours for the gregarious, the lonely or simply those condemned to occupy inadequate housing, are important social capital for working people — no wonder the leaders of the Reform Party make such a big fuss about enjoying a smoke and a pint.
Hamilton’s rising star is similar to that of painter LS Lowry who, once dismissed as a primitive artist, is now also being taken more seriously, and whose reputation has still not reached its zenith. Just as the novelist depicts a vanished Central London and South Coast pub culture, Lowry’s works portray a style of Northern industrial life which no longer exists.
The soundtrack (with original music composed by Terry Davies) is a treat for fans of early jazz. Bourne’s longstanding collaborator Lez Brotherton’s delicious variations on 1930s dress and underwear (oh, the underwear!) suggest he has a future designing for the runway if this theatre thing doesn’t work out. And Michela Meazza continues to be quietly mesmerising as Miss Roach.
My only complaint about this production concerns the lighting. From my seat a few rows back in the York Theatre Royal’s dress circle there was, for one big dance number, a light shining directly into my eyes. Thankfully, it did not precipitate another migraine but be warned if you’re a fellow sufferer.
From York The Midnight Bell tours to Sadler’s Wells, London (Jun 10-21, £15-£100), then returns to the North to Theatre Royal, Newcastle (Jul 8-12, £17-£58), Lyceum, Sheffield (Sep 23-27, £15-£50) and Alhambra, Bradford (Sep 30-Oct 4, £19-£50). Plus other dates nationally.
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