‘If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man’ Nick Hornby

Patrick Hamilton’s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne’s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

West Kensington – grey area of rot, and caretaking, and cat-slinking basements. West Kensington – drab asylum for the driven and cast-off genteel!’ Patrick Hamilton was acutely conscious that his third novel (first published in 1928) was longer and ‘much grimmer’ than his previous and well-received productions. Twopence Coloured is the story of nineteen-year-old Jackie Mortimer, who leaves Hove in search of a life on the London stage, only to become entangled in ‘provincial theatre’ and complex affairs of the heart with two brothers, Richard and Charles Gissing. The novel, unavailable for many years, is a gimlet-eyed portrait of the theatrical vocation, and fully exhibits Hamilton’s celebrated gift for conjuring London – the ‘vast, thronged, unknown, hooting, electric-lit, dark-rumbling metropolis.

Patrick Hamilton’s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne’s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

Measuring out the wartime days in a small town on the Thames, Miss Roach is not unattractive but no longer quite young. The Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, where she lives with half a dozen others, is as grey and lonely as its residents. For Miss Roach, ‘slave of her task-master, solitude’, a shaft of not altogether welcome light is suddenly beamed upon her, with the appearance of a charismatic and emotional American Lieutenant. With him comes change – tipping the precariously balanced society of the house and presenting Miss Roach herself with a dilemma.

‘If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man’ Nick Hornby

Patrick Hamilton’s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne’s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid’s secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars – a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.