Simon Reade’s stage adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s *Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky* brings together the intertwined stories of lonely Londoners Bob, Ella and Jenny. Set around the Midnight Bell pub, the production explores class, shame, control and unequal relationships, though the review finds it less menacing and psychologically deep than Hamilton’s novels.

Matthew Iliffe’s in-the-round production uses sparse, transformable staging, atmospheric lighting and sound to evoke interwar London and the characters’ isolation. The cast is praised for conveying premature weariness, uneasy humour and emotional instability, but the adaptation’s condensed structure reduces the novels’ interior monologues, social detail and sense of squalor; it runs at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 17 October.