Rambert in Peaky Blinders

Rambert’s Peaky Blinders is a dance take on one of the most successful and violent TV series of recent times…

Rambert publicity shot for ‘Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby’. © Johan Persson.

Rambert
Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby
★★★★✰
London, Sadler’s Wells
6 August 2025
rambert.org.uk
www.sadlerswells.com
Dedicated website - peakyblindersdance.com

My goodness, Rambert’s take on Peaky Blinders is a blitzkrieg of a production that, like the protagonists, rather grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Only a curmudgeon would fail to be moved by an awful lot of clever and thought-through production values that deliver narrative punch and really draw you into their violent clutches.

Peaky Blinders originally came to prominence in 2013 on the BBC as a story of a violent family and gang, growing its business in post-WW1 Birmingham. Enormously popular, it ran for six series through to 2022. It was created by Steven Knight, and he has been part of this production along with Rambert’s artistic director, Benoit Swan Pouffer. On TV, Peaky really glorified violence, and that both appalled but somehow made it sexy and chic, especially with its emphatic rock score led by its hammer-hitting-anvil anthem (called Red Right Hand) by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Impeccable period costuming was also a hallmark. If you liked it on TV, you will like the live version, which picks up on all these production details and sonically hits you in the guts. The soundtrack is amplified but played live by a three-piece band, drums led and featured high up at the back of the stage. The band really comes to the fore at times too — lending an almost rock concert feel to proceedings.

The staging (Moi Tran) is masterful and has the dancers on a metre-high artificial stage with, from the stalls, some unseen troughs in it that allow the dancers to appear and disappear rapidly — it really adds another dimension. This Peaky plot is new and spread across two acts. Nominally, the first act shows a prequel to the TV-told story with the context of heroic deeds in WW1 leading to less heroic deeds when back home. It’s also a love story between Tommy Shelby and bad girl Grace, who ends up violently dead. The second act unpacks Shelby’s mind — full of remorse, he enters a drug-filled dream world but slowly gets his shit back together, and it really ends with the gang all ready to take on the universe. Well, that was my reading; it’s a failure in the programme that there are no easy and rapidly-read words about the narrative. Although sold as a prequel, Grace as a character is actually seen in the first few episodes of the TV series. But no matter, it all holds together pretty well.

The Rambert dancers give their narrative all, led by Connor Kerrigan as Tommy and Naya Lovell as Grace. Although violent confrontation is at the heart of the show, I really liked the happier times with a day at the races and a glorious and rather louche cabaret section, with extra sass in which the whole company actually becomes more alive. It’s a night of committed acting and movement energy rather than a great night of inventive choreography — it can all feel rather rushed, and I wish the love between Grace and Tommy had had more time to be shown and in deeper emotional tones. But overall, Pouffer delivers enough, and the unstoppable Shelby train is all about ever moving on and looking classy — which this show certainly does.

I think the last time Rambert put on a whole evening production with such narrative heft was in Cruel Garden in the late ’90s. It was Lindsay Kemp and Christopher Bruce’s take on works by Lorca, and it too was a huge hit that, like this show, was very much toured and dominated the company for a while. Many look to put on a show with such West End/Matthew Bourne production values, but as was recently demonstrated with Quadrophenia, not all can deliver. Peaky Blinders is a great production and well worth catching¹ — as is Rambert in non-dancical mode, busy pushing contemporary boundaries in their normal guise. Not sure it’s the same audience, but the more through the doors, the merrier in my book.