| Birmingham Hippodrome
Benoit Swan Pouffer’s swaggering dancers fly, fling and slide across the stage in this energetic, menacing prequel-style show Have we reached peak Peaky fever? Hot on the heels of the Peaky Blinders immersive experience comes Peaky Blinders the dance show, performed by Rambert, who appeared in the show’s fifth series. It’s created by the company’s artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer alongside the TV show’s originator Steven Knight. This is not an exact retelling of the TV series, but a sort of prequel that merges into Tommy Shelby’s love affair with Grace Burgess and his descent into opium-fuelled despair. It certainly captures the bleak, menacing mood of what is in many ways a very theatrical piece of television: darkness, smoke, violence and driving music by American composer Roman GianArthur, sprinkled with Radiohead, Anna Calvi, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Nick Cave. GianArthur picks up threads from these bands in thrashing riffs and haunting vocals performed by Yorkshire songwriter The Last Morrell.
When Pouffer took over Rambert in 2018 he talked of change, diversity and seeking new audiences, as many directors do, but more than most he’s actually achieved it. Whether that’s gender fluid casting, integrating the wildly impressive amputee dancer Musa Motha, or mounting an idea as unashamedly populist as a TV-inspired show. In the way the series uses anachronistic music to heighten drama, Pouffer’s dance follows suit. The choreography has a commercial edge, drawing on street styles, and excels in blistering ensemble dances, punchy moves with bodies flying, flinging and sliding across the stage. The dancers come out all guns blazing (and knives, and razor blades), in rollicking brawls where bodies stab and lurch, full of swagger and attitude. The set, by Moi Tran, has the dancers on a raised platform (and the musicians raised again behind that) expanding the possibilities of the stage, but cutting off the dancers’ legs for people right at the front, which is an oversight. The scene at the races could be a pop concert set, with fairground lights and carousel horses, and costume designer Richard Gellar has gone to town on a 1920s look of glamour and grit.
These are not carbon copies of the television characters – although Simone Damberg Würtz is an appropriately fearsome Aunt Polly. Rather than a barmaid who croons Irish folk songs, this Grace (Naya Lovell) is a fierce nightclub singer who arrives in green velvet, lip-syncing to Laura Mvula. Part of what makes Tommy Shelby so compelling on screen is his inscrutability, the camera’s close-up ability to search for what’s behind the eyes. There’s no chance for that in a 2,000-seater theatre. It has to be big. So Guillaume Quéau’s Tommy is altogether more performative and knowingly buff, his dance of grief comes with lots of splits, for example. Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby is at Birmingham Hippodrome until 2 Oct, then touring. Continue reading... |
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