Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 novel The Midnight Bell follows the lives of Bob, a waiter, and Ella, a barmaid, as they open a pub on Euston Road in London. The story spans several weeks but feels like one long, winding night of drinking and missteps. Bob begins with £80, but by the end, he’s left with a hangover and just loose change, undone by his obsession with a sex worker named Jenny. In later novels, Hamilton revisited the lives of these women, giving them their own focused narratives. Simon Reade’s adaptation, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, weaves these stories together, starting in the middle of the action, which softens the original’s sharp twists but highlights the similarities between the characters’ relationships. In the play, when Ella enters a relationship with Ernest, a wealthier older man, it raises similar themes of class, shame, and power dynamics as Bob and Jenny’s troubled bond. Each couple is formed by lonely people seeking connection with others who are equally isolated. The production by Troupe, directed by Matthew Iliffe, emphasizes this loneliness through a minimalist set design by Ellie Wintour, which features a bar counter lowered by a pulley and stools rearranged into a bed. The soundscape, by Elizabeth Purnell, evokes the “grim, yet burdened and plaintive” noise of interwar London, a city that seems indifferent to the personal struggles of its inhabitants. Lighting by Alex Musgrave captures the smoky, foggy atmosphere of the era, while the cast moves around each other in a way that suggests the weight of their circumstances. The young characters seem older than they are, especially in the way Yanexi Enriquez’s Jenny uses a world-weary “dear” and Rosalind Lailey’s Ella struggles to maintain composure in her relationship with Ernest, played by Michael Maloney. Maloney’s performance includes some comic moments, like a scene with a hat, but the production lacks the full sense of menace and desperation found in Hamilton’s original work. Jordan Scowen’s portrayal of Bob shows the emotional shifts from intoxication to despair, but could dig deeper into the character’s turmoil. As a playwright, Hamilton is known for his psychologically intense works, such as Rope and Gaslight. Reade brings out Jenny’s painful past in a flashback involving a stranger, George, with unsettling lighting and movement direction. The physical interactions between characters often feel tense, such as prolonged embraces that grow uncomfortable. While the production captures the essence of the trilogy, it misses some of the nuanced social commentary in the original novels. The minimal stage design also limits the opportunity to explore the atmosphere of the Midnight Bell, which Hamilton compared to a theatre in itself. Despite these shortcomings, the production remains engaging and thought-provoking, running at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London, until 17 October.