Rambert Dance Company is keen to attract new audiences who don’t usually watch ballet; and what better way to do so than to stage a dance drama based on the hugely popular long-running BBC TV series Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby.
Rambert’s Artistic Director Benoit Swan Pouffer directs and choreographs the production, which has a rock concert feel with its rock music and rock concert strobe lighting. A live band plays specially commissioned music by Roman GianArthur and tracks from the TV series, including Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ compulsive “Red Right Hand”, which is used as the theme song.
Peaky Blinders’ creator Steven Knight has written the new script. But, If you haven’t seen the series, you may, like I did, have difficulty knowing what is going on. The storyline and characterisation are poor. The staging needs to be tightened up. I was never emotionally involved. There is a narrator but I could not always hear what he was saying.
The stage is dark and smoky. The action begins in the Flanders trenches during World War I. The soldiers traumatised by the war (alive but dead inside) do not fit into civilian life and turn to crime and ruthless gang warfare in Birmingham in the 1920s. Guillaume Quéau is Tommy Shelby and Naya Lovell is Grace Burgess, a nightclub singer, whom Tommy marries and who is killed on their wedding day.
The ensembles are energetic and macho aggressive in their underwear. There are dancers playing police dogs on leashes. There is a homoeotic duet in an opium den. Particularly effective is a number in and around and under a table. The street brawls are never as brutally violent as the murders on television.
The cast includes the amazing amputee dancer Musa Motha who has solos and a duet and uses his crutch as a support and as a weapon. Dylan Tedaldi is an amusing caricature of a leering factory foreman.
The show has been enthusiastically received by critics and audiences. Peaky fans arrived at the première in Birmingham’s Hippodrome in 2022 dressed in period flat cloth caps and flapper costumes. I am clearly out on a limb in my disappointment.
After watching Rambert’s stage version, I watched the BBC’s 14-minute ultimate recap of the TV series, which instantly gave me a good idea of what I had been missing and what I had expected on stage and didn’t get.
Rambert Dance Company’s Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby can be viewed free on BBC iPlayer.