Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky at Southwark Playhouse

Simon Reade's stage adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky has opened at Southwark Playhouse Borough in London, condensing the author's trilogy of interlocking novels into a single engrossing play.

Hamilton published the trilogy's first novel, The Midnight Bell, in 1929. The book unfolds over a series of weeks but, as the review notes, carries "the air of one winding night on the tiles in London." Its protagonist is Bob, a waiter at the eponymous pub on Euston Road. He starts the novel flush, with £80 to his name, opening the bar for business alongside the barmaid Ella. By the end, he wakes with a brutal hangover and loose change, thoroughly undone by his obsession with a sex worker named Jenny.

Hamilton then told the women's stories in turn. In two later novels, he reframed the lives of Ella and Jenny separately, and the trilogy "gains great power through separating out their lives, giving each a concentrated interior monologue."

Reade's adaptation takes the opposite approach. Rather than presenting the novels sequentially, it interweaves them throughout and opens in medias res. The review finds this trade-off cuts both ways: the structure dilutes the elements of surprise and downward spiral that build across the separate novels, yet it draws out parallels between the relationships.

When Ella drifts into a union with Ernest, a better-off older suitor, the pairing raises issues of class, shame and control not dissimilar to those in the stumbling, equally imbalanced affair between Jenny and Bob. The review's verdict on the trilogy's cast: "Each couple is formed by the lonely seeking out the lonely."

The adaptation earns the description "richly atmospheric" in its source material's spirit, producing an engrossing evening of theatre — though the review suggests the production could be more unsettling than it ultimately is.

The production gives London audiences a rare chance to see Hamilton's lost Londoners — Bob, Ella and Jenny — share a single stage, with the trilogy's portrait of loneliness in the capital now condensed into one sitting.