Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky at Southwark Playhouse Borough – review

Condensing a trio of novels into a play with a total stage time of less than two hours is an ambitious task, but that’s what dramatist Simon Reade attempts with Patrick Hamilton’s early 1930s Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. The title is an oblique reference to London itself, and Hamilton’s semi-autobiographical books are a grimy tribute to his own dissolution on the streets and in the public houses of the capital between the world wars. Episodic and sprawling but, in Matthew Iliffe’s captivating staging, endlessly atmospheric, the story provides multiple snapshots of a city in a time of social and fiscal uncertainty and upheaval, where conventional morality takes a back seat to the need to make a buck.

Staged with the audience on all four sides, Iliffe’s production has a dark vitality and absolute mastery of the space, while taking the story at a cracking pace. Designer Ellie Wintour employs a bare minimum of props and furnishings, having Alex Musgrave (lighting) and Elizabeth Purcell (composer and sound) do the heavy lifting to evoke the murky London streets, interiors genteel and sordid, a jazz club dance floor and the Midnight Bell public house. 

Technically, it’s striking and impressive but a fine production can’t quite compensate for the fact that, in turning three books into a fairly short play with only six actors, Reader’s adaptation sometimes feels like a symphony rescored for a sextet who can’t quite hit the right notes. It’s not the actors’ fault – they mostly do a terrific job of portraying characters that brevity has rendered two dimensional –  but the chronological jumping around and sheer speed of the storytelling obscure the plot at times and prevent us from fully engaging with the lonely, troubled human beings at the heart of it. 

Just as a plot strand becomes genuinely interesting (the uneasy dynamic between cautious barmaid Ella and opportunistic toff Ernest Eccles, or Yanexi Enriquez’s spirited working girl’s descent into prostitution and alcohol dependence) the focus is switched and we are off on a tangent. The BBC TV adaptation 20 years ago was divided into three full length episodes, and this theatrical treatment might benefit from a more expansive approach.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky on stage probably works best not as a conventional play but as a tapestry of urban lives that nearly a century ago felt racy but now seem rather quaint. Iliffe and movement director Sam Spencer-Lane have done a wonderful job of suggesting a bustling metropolis where individuals pick themselves out for a brief moment before disappearing back into the morass of humanity.

Of those individuals, Enriquez probably makes the strongest impression, charting with wide-eyed defensiveness and an engaging sense of abandon how goodtime girl Jenny Maple’s life has gone so spectacularly off the rails. Rosalind Lailey invests Ella with an unforced goodness and a satisfyingly hard edge. Michael Maloney as her much older admirer finds an intriguing streak of unhinged misogyny and snobbery underneath his surface bonhomie. Jordan Scowen is a likeable, flawed everyman in thrall to Jenny, as Bob, the slightly bewildered stand-in for Hamilton himself. Alex Bhat is equal parts seductive, menacing and messy as the upper crust loser who sets Jenny on the path to destruction, and Lucy Gray provides welcome comic relief as a disapproving tea house waitress and a particularly jolly prostitute.

Although it leaves us wanting in terms of storytelling and character development, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is an undeniably effective bittersweet love letter to a capital city now long lost to us. Like Witness For The Prosecution at County Hall and the Oliver! revival, it feels like the kind of show one should direct foreign tourists to if they’re in search of something that is quintessentially old school London on stage. Is it a great play? No. Is it a memorable piece of theatre? Very much so.