Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Southwark Playhouse Borough
Thursday 17th September 2026
Patrick Hamilton is best known today as the writer of the 1941 novel Hangover Square, and the plays Gaslight and Rope. His evocations of the seedy side of London life, especially its bohemian drinking culture, are a creative image factory of characters and situations which challenge the middle-class respectability of early 20th century England. But can his novels work as theatre? While Hangover Square was adapted by Fidelis Morgan in 2008, and the more obscure The Slaves of Solitude by Nicholas Wright in 2017, this is the first time that Hamilton’s trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, has been put on stage.
You can see why: the three semi-autobiographical novels — The Midnight Bell (1929), The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) — are a challenge to adapt. They have a panoramic quality and repetitive density that invites television serialization, which the BBC managed in 2005, rather than theatrical compression. Still, this version by Simon Reade, currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse Borough, has a commendable compactness, which honours the original’s basic narrative if not its psychological density. The plot centres on three characters — Bob, Ella and Jenny — whose lives revolve around The Midnight Bell pub, vaguely situated in London’s Fitzrovia.
It’s Christmas 1929, with the effects of the Wall Street Crash still making headlines, and 25-year-old Bob is a Cockney barman who works at the pub with Ella, who’s about the same age and likewise from working people. When the 21-year-old sex worker Jenny, and her friend Prunella, pop in for a drink, Bob is attracted to her, apparently oblivious to the fact that Ella meanwhile really fancies him. Another casual drinker, the posh 52-year-old Mr Eccles, finds himself drawn to Ella, and then Jenny by chance meets a man from her past, the despicable Perry.
All three youngsters are, in one way or another, obsessed, and suffer as they see their hopes dashed. The aspirational Bob is struggling to write a novel, but becomes infatuated with Jenny, who cannot — except casually and randomly — return his affections. She keeps agreeing to meet him, then cries off. And she keeps taking the money he’s saved up. Eventually, his only cure is to leave London. Ella, of course, is likewise unable to realise her desire for love with Bob, who likes her but feels little else. She finds herself at first bewildered and unable to resist the advances of Eccles, whose infatuation is expressed in an exaggerated display of earnestness. Finally, Jenny is a victim of abuse who is now unable to love, rejects commitment and drinks herself into oblivion.
Reade’s version reproduces the cadences of interwar English vernacular, and explores some of the emotions of the characters, which range from glum resignation to passionate flare ups, with casual untruths and wry comments aplenty. At one point, Eccles perceptively says that what the younger Ella and he have in common is their loneliness, and this sense of aloneness pervades the whole story. Jenny, who has been traumatized by her treatment at the hands of men like Perry, is alone despite being attractive to Bob, and friends with Prunella. Ella is quietly desperate for human connection.
Love in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is problematic. The desires of Bob and Eccles are examples of male fantasy, both being infatuated and seeing themselves as masculine saviours. They project their needs onto women, who certainly don’t feel the same. Upper-class Perry is a drunken predatory bastard. By contrast, the women are more complicated: Ella’s love of Bob is very restrained and unrequited, while Jenny swings erratically between returning Bob’s feelings and running away from him. Both have been damaged by their upbringing, their class status a definite disadvantage in the cruel world of Depression London.
The play is also a love letter to the metropolis, whose capacity to create anonymity, seclusion and chance encounters is evident in the myriad streets evoked by the trilogy’s title. As “the Plains of Cement” also suggests, it’s a cold hard environment, especially if you are a sex worker in the alleys and dark corners of the town. The winter season adds to the chilliness of the emotions. By contrast, the pub is a haven of warmth and conviviality, where alcohol encourages sociability and loosens the traditional English reserve. But drink is also seen as both a cause of despair and a temporary respite from it. Alcoholism pervades the action.
Running at two hours, with an interval, Reade’s play is very succinct if a bit slender. Bob’s speech about a man being “a servant of his passions” is one of the rare moments when Hamilton’s sense of his characters’ subjectivity comes to the surface, but the rest is rather rapid, and rather superficial, storytelling as the play rushes through 28 short scenes, although the second half is better than the first. In Matthew Iliffe’s pacey in-the-round production, the challenging acoustics of the theatre space make it difficult to hear all the dialogue, while Ellie Wintour’s stage design could do with some more chairs so the actors don’t have to sit on the floor so often.
Still, the acting is excellent: Yanexi Enriquez’s Jenny and Jordan Scowen’s Bob, who surely represents Hamilton, have a youthful energy and convincingly perform the passions and contradictions of their characters. Their jazz-age dance sequence is a highpoint. Likewise, Rosalind Lailey’s Ella has a rather tender vulnerability along with a self-reliant edge, which contrasts well with Michael Maloney’s almost childish longings and overt snobbery, while Alex Bhat’s Perry is vividly domineering. In support Lucy Gray plays Prunella and two other women. All this makes for an enjoyable, if hardly energizing, evening of Hamilitonian themes.
This review first appeared on The Arts Desk
- Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 17 October.
