Depressingly corny: Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, reviewed

Spectator

02-07-2025

It's all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler's Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend's Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several iterations and rewrites since the recording was first released on vinyl by the Who in 1973. An audience of all shapes and ages seemed to be having a good time, but although there's nothing disgraceful about the show that director Rob Ashford has overseen, it seemed to me depressingly corny and laboured – a bumpy ride hitched to a creaky old bandwagon.
You may recall the premise: searching for a focus to his banal adolescent existence, Jimmy is a disaffected, angsty mod of the early 1960s with something by Camus in his coat pocket. Tormented by his four conflicted inner selves, he rejects the values of his suburban parents and gets caught up in the seaside war with the rockers. Love and friendship let him down; the drugs don't work. He ends up isolated in disillusion and misery as the waves break thunderously on Brighton beach.
The score has been 'symphonically' orchestrated by Townshend's wife Rachel Fuller: excised of his lyrics, it loses whatever acerbic critical edge it originally had and becomes a relentless noise, monotonously pitched, painfully over-amplified and devoid of light and shade. But the staging is super-slick. Both Christopher Oram's sets (leaning heavily on projections and video) and Paul Smith's costumes efficiently evoke the era, while the cast presents a well-drilled, multitasking ensemble, making the most of the mechanically athletic choreography by Paul Roberts. The doe-eyed Paris Fitzpatrick is engagingly vulnerable as the protagonist and Dan Baines is a malign presence as the leader of the mod pack. God knows what satisfaction the Royal Ballet's Matthew Ball extracted from his pointless cameo as a preening pop idol. The women appear as nothing more than silly dolly birds.
The master of this genre of narrative ballet is Matthew Bourne: but what he has – and what Quadrophenia fatally lacks – is a light touch that avoids futile gesturing at large philosophical themes. It's this quality that irradiates Bourne's The Midnight Bell, currently revived for the first time since its première in 2021. It's one of Bourne's strongest and most distinctive shows, playing to all his strengths and rooted in his enduring fascination with the seedier aspects of mid-20th century London.
Loosely drawing on the novels of Patrick Hamilton (with nods towards Rodney Ackland's play Absolute Hell), it focuses on a dismal Soho pub in the 1930s that serves as a magnet for spivs, cads, tarts and queers, all of them either lonely or desperate. Ten such wounded characters drink their sorrows and dreams away over one sorry night. Although there's not much in the form of plot beyond a series of unsuccessful seductions and emotional disappointments, Bourne manages to create vivid personalities, ingeniously weaving the slim narrative threads and using his (somewhat limited) choreographic language to establish credible psychological detail. It's also sharply funny.
Terry Davies provides a period-appropriate score, and at intervals popular songs of an Al Bowlly nature are wittily mimed. Lez Brotherston has designed a richly atmospheric set, beautifully lit by Paule Constable: you can almost taste the gin and smell the woodbine.
Running at 90-odd minutes it risks seeming a bit thin and protracted, but a uniformly excellent cast ensures that it holds fast and charms. A national tour continues until October.