I Get A Funny Feeling Inside Of Me
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. (Southwark Playhouse - Borough)
Long before I was aware of Patrick Hamilton's famous twenties-set book, I knew those streets: a friend's family ran The Tower Tavern under what those of my generation still call The Post Office Tower, its coating of off-white ceramic tiles making it resemble a giant urinal. It was here, in Fitzrovia, that the murderous photographer in Peeping Tom stalked his quarry, Terry and Arthur tried to straighten a wonky lamppost and George Orwell used to enjoy a pint and a pie at the Newman Arms. Exactly which pub Hamilton based The Midnight Bell on is undocumented - perhaps it was an amalgam of several - but I'm sure I have drunk and been drunk in it/them. To its south, Fitzrovia bleeds into Soho where, above the Pillars of Hercules, another friend had a flat I would stay in...but anyone who doesn't know Soho doesn't deserve to call themselves a Londoner.
I might not know all twenty thousand of these streets, but I know enough and, despite the minimalist staging used, I could easily imagine Bob (Jordan Scowen) chasing after Jenny (Yanexi Enriquez) through them, their doomed affair from the first of the trilogy (The Midnight Bell, named after the fictitious pub) inspired by the author's own. He too, as a struggling writer and barman, had fallen for a girl sliding into prostitution, just as his father had.
It is on the casting of these two leads that an adaption of this work stands or falls (the BBC three-parter with Bryan Dick and Zoe Tapper was superlative) and this was successfully pulled off here. Bob was no mere naive simp and Jenny not just a tragic victim. Both were very real human beings, their story, while bleak, not without its humour. The rest of the cast are exemplary too: Alex Bhat as the cad George Parry (again, the urge to make him into a pantomime villain resisted here), Lucy Gray as Jenny's more streetwise friend Prunella and Rosalind Lailey as Ella, the girl Bob SHOULD have ended up with. The show is stolen, though, by the warm, familiar face of Michael Moloney as Ella's aging, posh, comically unsuitable suitor, Ernest Eccles. Moloney, who you've seen in every detective drama in TV there has ever been (he's back in Marble Hall Murders, the last of the Magpie Murders trilogy, next week) makes Eccles less sleazy than in the book, a bumbling, laughable fool but strangely likable nevertheless.
This staging is absorbing, funny, warm and heartbreaking. I can't recommend it highly enough. Do make sure you go to the right theatre, though: Borough, rather than Elephant - there are two Southwark Playhouses, either side of the Elephant and Castle roundabout. If you get it wrong, you get to see a musical version of Jane Eyre, not the same kind of thing at all.
Previous adaptations of the trilogy Bitter Harvest -