Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky review – the bell tolls for Patrick Hamilton’s lost Londoners

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Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 novel The Midnight Bell unfolds over a series of weeks but has the air of one winding night on the tiles in London. The waiter Bob starts out flush, with £80 to his name, as he opens up the eponymous Euston Road pub for business alongside barmaid Ella. At the end of the novel, he wakes with a brutal hangover and loose change, thoroughly undone by his obsession with a sex worker, Jenny. In two later novels, Hamilton reframed each of these women’s stories in turn. His trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, gains great power through separating out their lives, giving each a concentrated interior monologue.

Simon Reade’s adaptation instead interweaves them throughout and opens in medias res, diluting the elements of surprise and downward spiral yet drawing out parallels between the relationships. When Ella muddles into a union with a better-off older suitor, Ernest, it raises not dissimilar issues of class, shame and control to Jenny and Bob’s own stumbling, equally imbalanced affair. Each couple is formed by the lonely seeking out the lonely.

Rosalind Lailey (Ella Dawson) and Michael Maloney (Ernest Eccles).

Hamilton’s set of characters is pruned and Matthew Iliffe’s well-blocked, in-the-round production for Troupe emphasises the isolation, heightened by Ellie Wintour’s sparse set design with a bar counter lowered by a pulley system and stools rearranged into a bed. Elizabeth Purnell’s soundscape captures what Hamilton described as the “grim, yet burdened and plaintive” noise of a busy city that is here impervious to these personal crises. Alex Musgrave’s lighting gives us an interwar London of fog, smoke and gas lamps as the cast swirl around each other.

The central young characters are each shown to seem old before their time. It’s there in the way Yanexi Enriquez’s Jenny uses a world-weary “dear” and how Rosalind Lailey’s Ella must dig deep not to make do with the fastidious and appropriately named Ernest, whom Michael Maloney turns into a study of later-life disquiet. Maloney excels at a nice bit of comic business with a hat and there is a vein of uneasy humour but more menace is needed across the production, which never fully captures the trilogy’s jaundiced prose or more squalid locations. Jordan Scowen’s Bob switches well between being intoxicated, crestfallen and disgusted with Jenny but should plumb greater depths of despair.

Yanexi Enriquez lying prone confronted by Alex Bhat (George Perry) lit by intense red light .

As a playwright, Hamilton is best known for two thrillers of cruelty – Rope and Gaslight – and Reade draws out Jenny’s formative sadistic encounter with a stranger, George (Alex Bhat), in a flashback heightened by queasy lighting from Alex Musgrave and Sam Spencer-Lane’s sharp movement direction. The physicality is often astute: there are several prolonged embraces that grow uncomfortable for one of those involved.

You miss the obsessive inner wrangling over social status in the novels, although Enriquez deftly suggests Jenny’s turmoil about what even a choice of drink may signify about her when she meets George through another sex worker, Prunella (Lucy Gray). The minimal setup also denies the chance to pore over a detailed design for the Midnight Bell, whose personal and public atmospheres Hamilton likened to a theatre itself. But this engrossing production mostly gets the measure of the trilogy.