The upcoming sixth series of blockbuster BBC drama Peaky Blinders will be the last but a new dance-theatre production written by the show’s creator Steven Knight is to retell the Birmingham gangster saga on stage.
Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, announced on Monday, will open this autumn at Birmingham Hippodrome then tour in 2023. It is a collaboration with Rambert dance company and will feature a cast of 20 and a live band playing specially commissioned music.
The French choreographer Benoit Swan Pouffer, who was announced as Rambert’s new artistic director in 2018, will stage what he describes as an “inspiring and uplifting” production. The stage show picks up the story of the Peaky Blinders at the end of the first world war and opens in the trenches. It will focus on the romance between Tommy Shelby (played in the TV series by Cillian Murphy) and barmaid-cum-undercover-agent Grace Burgess (played by Annabelle Wallis).
Knight said that the series “has always had music and movement at its heart and now the beating heart of the show will be transferred to the stage”. The production “is dance for people who don’t usually watch dance,” he continued. “If the concept of a Peaky Blinders dance seems strange, reserve judgment and reserve a ticket.”
Helen Shute, CEO and executive producer of Rambert, said: “We’re incredibly honoured to be trusted by Steven Knight with his nationally beloved Peaky Blinders … We look forward to welcoming a new generation of audiences to theatres with a story that speaks to so many people.”
The show will have its world premiere at Birmingham Hippodrome, where it runs from 27 September to 2 October. It then moves to London’s Troubadour Wembley Park theatre (12 October- 6 November) before embarking on a 2023 tour.
Pouffer, who will direct and choreograph the production, said that the show “is something on a scale we’ve never done before” and that he “couldn’t be more ready for the challenge”. Rambert is Britain’s oldest dance company and had a 14-month hiatus from touring caused by the Covid-19 pandemic – the longest break in its 95-year history. A grant from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund helped the company return to stages last May. In September 2019, Pouffer choreographed a Rambert performance at the first official Peaky Blinders festival, a weekend event also featuring Primal Scream and held in the Digbeth and Small Heath areas of Birmingham, where the original gang who inspired the series were based.
This is not the first time that Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has written for the stage. His play The President of an Empty Room, set over the course of one day in a Cuban cigar factory, was directed by Howard Davies at the National Theatre in London in 2005. Last year, Knight said that the Peaky Blinders story would continue as a film after the TV series had ended. “My plan from the beginning was to end Peaky with a movie,” he told Deadline. “That is what is going to happen.”
Before Rambert’s show opens, a separate stage production hopes to attract the huge fanbase of the TV juggernaut which was first broadcast on BBC2 in 2013 and whose fifth series – taking a primetime Sunday night slot on BBC1 – launched to an audience of 6.2 million in 2019. The immersive theatre show Peaky Blinders: The Rise will be staged at the Vanguard theatre in Camden, north London, this summer. It is directed by Tom Maller and designed by Rebecca Brower whose immersive adventure Doctor Who: Time Fracture opened in the summer of 2021.
