Cheers to Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell – a boozy, sumptuous dance of hidden feelings

In The Midnight Bell, choreographer Matthew Bourne conjures up a 1930s world of loneliness and longing. Based on novels and stories by Patrick Hamilton, this dance drama unpicks the lives of regulars at a Soho pub as they flirt, try to keep their feelings buttoned up, and drink, drink, drink.

Created in 2021, nominated for five National Dance Awards and winning choreography and performance awards for Bourne and Michela Meazza, the show was inspired partly by the isolation of the pandemic. It brings together 10 characters trapped in a web of failed and failing relationships, observed with humour and tenderness.

Bourne’s greatest gift is his eye for character: he packs so much understanding into how people stand, the way they glance at one another, set down a glass or hold a cigarette. It’s a wordless drama of people who wouldn’t know how to say what they feel.

With motivation and feeling so well visualised, Bourne can weave multiple stories together. Six different plotlines overlap with perfect clarity: at one point, two or three love affairs unfold in opposite corners of the same bed. Bourne takes his tales from different Hamilton stories, and adds one of his own – a chorus boy falling head over heels for a new young man.

The period setting is beautifully realised. Lez Brotherston’s set hangs windows against a stormy sky, evoking a maze of seedy London streets. A pub bar or park bench set up different locations, as action spills from one drinking place to the next. A line of chairs, with Paule Constable’s lighting flickering overhead, becomes a cinema where one ill-matched couple edge their way awkwardly past the other patrons.

Brotherston’s costumes are gorgeously precise: the neat tweeds of Michela Meazza’s lonely spinster against the slacks, scarves and beret of Daisy May Kemp’s out-of-work actor, or the draggled velvet finery of Ashley Shaw’s sex worker. On the dancers of Bourne’s New Adventures company, period clothes look lived-in and familiar: the whole cast is completely in tune with the style and each other.

The show opens with Dominic North’s waiter and his romantic dreams, dancing with his own pillow until the alarm goes off and drags him into work. Terry Davies’ commissioned score drives the action with jazzy themes and urgent percussion, but at key moments switches to original 1930s pop songs: Al Bowlly and Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson singing Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. Characters step out and lip sync their innermost feelings, opening up to the glamour of the music. Then real life takes over, and they hide themselves away again.

Until 21 June at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, then touring