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

The Southwark Playhouse Borough in London is currently presenting "Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky," a theatrical adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's seminal trilogy of novels. Hamilton, a British novelist and playwright known for his bleak portrayals of working-class life and social alienation in interwar London, originally published "The Midnight Bell" in 1929. This novel, the first in the sequence, chronicles a single, extended night of revelry and despair for its characters. The narrative centers on Bob, a waiter who begins the story with a seemingly substantial £80, a sum indicative of his initial financial stability. However, his fortunes rapidly decline due to an obsessive infatuation with Jenny, a sex worker. The subsequent novels in the trilogy, while not explicitly named in the provided text, each revisited the lives of the women featured in "The Midnight Bell," offering concentrated interior monologues that lent the original works significant emotional power by isolating their individual experiences and psychological depths.

Simon Reade's adaptation, however, opts for a different structural approach. Instead of maintaining the distinct narratives of the original novels, Reade interweaves the stories of the characters, opening the play "in medias res" – in the middle of the action. This departure from Hamilton's original structure, according to the review, dilutes some of the impact of the characters' inevitable downward spirals and diminishes the element of surprise inherent in their individual descents. Nevertheless, this interwoven approach does succeed in drawing compelling parallels between the various relationships depicted. For instance, the barmaid Ella's entanglement with Ernest, an older suitor of greater financial means, brings to the fore issues of class, shame, and control that resonate with the equally imbalanced and fraught affair between Jenny and Bob. The review posits that a central theme connecting these disparate unions is the fundamental human need for connection, with each couple formed by lonely individuals seeking solace and companionship in their shared isolation.

While the adaptation strives to create a cohesive and unified theatrical experience from Hamilton's distinct literary sources, the review suggests that the play could have benefited from a more unsettling tone. The original novels, particularly "The Midnight Bell," are lauded for their atmospheric evocation of a single, extended night out on the town, a potent sense of immediate, lived experience that the condensed and interwoven structure of the play may not fully replicate. The reviewer implies that the original novels' unflinching focus on individual psychological disintegration and the often grim, tangible realities of their characters' lives might have offered a more profound and potent emotional impact than the current adaptation's emphasis on broader thematic connections. The production is staged at the Southwark Playhouse Borough, a venue recognized for its commitment to intimate and often challenging theatrical productions, making it a fitting space for exploring Hamilton's enduringly relevant themes of urban loneliness and social struggle.