Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 novel The Midnight Bell unfolds over a series of weeks but has the air of one winding night on the tiles in London. The waiter Bob starts out flush, with £80 to his name, as he opens up the eponymous Euston Road pub for business alongside barmaid Ella. At the end of the novel, he wakes with a brutal hangover and loose change, thoroughly undone by his obsession with a sex worker, Jenny. In two later novels, Hamilton reframed each of these women’s stories in turn. His trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, gains great power through separating out their lives, giving each a concentrated interior monologue.
Simon Reade’s adaptation instead interweaves them throughout and opens in medias res, diluting the elements of surprise and downward spiral yet drawing out parallels between the relationships. When Ella muddles into a union with a better-off older suitor, Ernest, it raises not dissimilar issues of class, shame and control to Jenny and Bob’s own stumbling, equally imbalanced affair. Each couple is formed by the lonely seeking out the lonely.
