'I love the marriage of dance and storytelling'

NTOXICATED tales from darkest Soho.

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Sir Matthew Bourne's New Adventures production of a "hauntingly beautiful and achingly moving" The Midnight Bell takes to the stage in the West Country next week.

The Midnight Bell explores 1930s London life where ordinary people emerge from cheap boarding houses nightly to pour out their passions, hopes and dreams in the pubs and bars of fog-bound Soho and Fitzrovia.

The highly celebrated choreographer Matthew Bourne takes audiences inside The Midnight Bell tavern where one particular lonely-hearts club gathers to play out their lovelorn affairs of the heart, bitter comedies of longing, frustration, betrayal and redemption.

Bourne's thrilling work is inspired by the great English novelist Patrick Hamilton (Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, Hangover Square), who created some of the most authentic fiction of his era, stories borne out of years of social interactions with the working man and woman at his favourite location, the London pub.

The cast features 14 of New Adventures' finest leading actors/ dancers in roles that challenge and reveal the darker reaches of the human heart: Cordelia Braithwaite, Reece Causton, Glenn Graham, Daisy May Kemp, Hannah Kremer, Michela Meazza, Andy Monaghan, Liam Mower, Dominic North, Bryony Pennington, Edwin Ray, Danny Reubens, Ashley Shaw and Alan Vincent. For nearly 30 years these dancers have, between them, performed leading roles to critical acclaim in every production in Matthew Bourne's repertoire.

Whatever production “master storyteller” Matthew Bourne and his company New Adventures do is one not to miss, I remarked to Daisy May Kemp, who lives in the Redland area of Bristol. What can audiences expect of The Midnight Bell?