Peaky Blinders, review: Tommy Shelby conquers Birmingham – all over again
From the very first seconds of Peaky Blinders back in 2013, when gangster Tommy Shelby sauntered imperiously through a 1919 Birmingham slum on a magnificent race-horse – called Monaghan Boy, no less – it was clear that this was a drama with a fresh kind of “attitude”. But no one, least of all the series’s creator, Steven Knight, had the faintest idea what a phenomenon it would prove.
His crime epic would run to six series, garner audiences of almost six million, and inspire everything from a hair-cut (the “skin fade”) to an immersive “live experience”, a planned feature film, and now, six months after the 36th, final episode, a show by the venerable Rambert Dance.
Created by Knight with Rambert’s artistic director and choreographer Benoit Swan Pouffer, this 145-minute dance-theatrical concoction is part prequel, part retelling, part (in Act II) a journey into the morphine-drenched mind of Tommy. With help from a pre-recorded voiceover by series alumnus Benjamin Zephaniah, it begins in Flanders, putting the Shelbys’ murderous nihilism in context – cue convulsive, panic-stricken movement set to the thunder of the battlefield.
It goes on to trace the family’s rise in the Birmingham underworld, focusing on the romance between Tommy and Grace, who (as Peaky fans will know) goes on to become his first wife and mother of his son, Charles. The two major dramatic catches (as they’ll also know) are that she is in fact an undercover Special Branch agent, and that she comes to a shocking end.
On the dedicated website, Knight clearly sets out his stall: “This is dance for people who don’t usually watch dance”. Well, as an enthusiastic if not un-critical fan of the series who does usually watch dance, I have to say that I – like everyone the Shelbys ever come up against – found resistance entirely useless.
Sure, the snooty dance critic in me at first bemoaned how much more poetically other choreographers – from Kenneth MacMillan to Akram Khan – have previously explored the horrors of war. And I also initially feared that the visibility of the musicians was a modish affectation. But the (contemporary) steps, while hardly subtle, do have a clarity and kick that work, the whole thing has just the right Peaky flavour (all credit to the lighting, set and costume team), and the band’s high profile in fact makes complete sense.
For what the show’s creators have shrewdly done is to take one of the TV series’s chief tropes – chic 1920s ultraviolence playing out to cleverly anachronistic 21st-century music – and cranked it up to 11, so much so that (à la Hofesh Shechter) you can never quite tell whether you’re at a dance show or a grungy rock gig. Lots of familiar songs from the series (by Nick Cave et al) are served up, augmented by those live musicians and a perfectly in-tune new score by Roman Gianarthur, all of which remorselessly powers the action along.
While the the spectre of Cillian Murphy inevitably haunts it – as Tommy, that cracking dancer Guillaume Quéau has tremendous swagger and attack, if not Murphy’s uniquely eery, intelligent beauty – his is merely one of the uniformly strong lead performances (particular praise also to Conor Kerrigan's Arthur and Musa Motha's Barney – decidedly punchy both – and Naya Lovell’s simply electrifying Grace). And, while Act II at times has the air of a more self-indulgent B-side, Tommy’s drug-induced “trip” is nothing if not vividly handled.
On Wednesday, the Birmingham home crowd gave the show a rousing hero’s welcome, and, as it tours, newcomers to dance could well find this edgy, punchy, polished slice of entertainment an ideal “gateway drug” into the art form. A warmly doffed peaked cap, then, from this Monahan boy.
In Birmingham until Sun Oct 2, then touring until May 2023; peakyblindersdance.com
