Theatre review:Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

It's billed as an adaptation of a novel, but Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky actually turns out to be three of them, a trilogy of interconnected stories about working class Londoners in the 1920s. It means Simon Reade's adaptation of them into a single two-hour show can be called brave at the very least, possibly foolhardy - it does explain something about the rather stilted evening we end up with, always hovering on the edge of something charming but never really getting there. At the centre of the story is a pub, The Midnight Bell, and two of the bar staff: Bob (Jordan Scowen) has been carefully building up his savings, but his inability to stand back when someone he cares about is in need means he's lately become prone to sudden acts of generosity, handing out cash to people like his longtime friend and coworker Ella (Rosalind Lailey.)

The trouble starts when he falls in love with prostitute Jenny (Yanexi Enriquez,) who's very convincing at appearing to return his feelings, but is actually using him to fund her own revenge plan.

Meanwhile Ella is dealing with an overly-attached customer of her own - ageing bachelor Ernest (Michael Maloney) has become smitten with her, and she's left with the dilemma of a marriage proposal from someone completely inappropriate that would at least leave her a bit more financially comfortable. This feels like the least strongly defined of the three story strands, and a look at the book's synopsis suggests Ernest is written as significantly more doddery and confused than Maloney makes him, which would explain why Ella has so much trouble working out what he wants from her.

The cast are doing all the heavy lifting in this adaptation though, giving us characters we can at least slightly feel for. But while I haven't read the books - they might in fact be incredibly light on plot for all I know - it's still clear that squeezing all that in has resulted in Reade delivering a fairly plodding adaptation that dutifully delivers each plot point before moving on to the next one.

Matthew Iliffe's production is also pretty businesslike, most notable in the third story strand that follows Jenny's history with George (Alex Bhat,) the man who ruined her life, and what turns out to be her incredibly low-stakes revenge*. It's told in a mix of linear time, flashback and flash-forward, but while it's not hard to work out where we are in the story once a scene's got going, there are no visual or sound cues to help us get there, just the next scene in the script dutifully put on stage.

If this is the sad underside to the party between the wars Reade and Iliffe give us all underside and no party and certainly none of the epic scope the title implies: For all the mentions of flapper haircuts and nightclubs the lack of flourish makes this more the Whispering Twenties than the Roaring ones. But the efforts of the cast, including Lucy Gray in various drily comic supporting roles, make this infinitely more watchable than it has any right to be.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Simon Reade, based on the novels by Patrick Hamilton, is booking until the 17th of October at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mitzi de Margary.

*"I have hunted you down through time and space, and now you're going to pay! ...£1† more than we had previously negotiated, mwahahahaha."

†for context, she's already fleeced the naïve but entirely blameless Bob of somewhere between £50-80 by this point