Review: Peaky Blinders The Redemption of Thomas Shelby at Liverpool Empire ****1/2

Liverpool has a special place in the Peaky Blinders story – it’s here where substantial portions of the early series were filmed, the city’s streets and historic interiors moonlighting as post-Great War Birmingham.

So it’s somehow apt that this latest UK tour of Rambert Dance's Peaky Blinders is kicking off (and I use the phrase advisedly) in the city this week.

Written by the TV series’ creator Steven Knight, The Redemption of Thomas Shelby takes characters who will be familiar to Peaky Blinders devotees and creates a story arc which carries Tommy Shelby from the hell of the Western Front to a different type of hell and, as the title suggests, finally offers a kind of redemption – albeit one that comes at a high price.

It’s brutal but beautiful stuff, strikingly staged and delivered through bold and creative storytelling which combines director Benoit Swan Pouffer’s eloquent choreography, which is both intensely physical and gently lyrical, a poetic narrative voiced by the late Benjamin Zephaniah and a loud and hypnotically throbbing, grungy score performed by a live three-piece band.

Tommy’s (Conor Kerrigan) nihilism is forged in the crucible of war where he and his Peaky Blinders brothers in arms are part of the Warwickshire Yeomanry’s ‘tunnelling brigade’, surviving the conflict but, as Zephaniah’s voiceover intones, ‘dead inside’.

Building a criminal empire in peacetime Birmingham – a captivating, vivid whirl of industry, racecourses, fairgrounds and killer diller nightclub dancers – Shelby meets Naya Lovell’s mysterious Grace and love blossoms against the odds.

Above and top: Tommy Shelby and the Peaky Blinders. Photos by Johan Persson.

And yet, as the Bunnymen sang, nothing lasts forever, and there’s a destructive spiral which grips Act 2 - titled ‘Thomas Shelby in the Underworld’ and on which the audience is taken on a somewhat long, albeit seductive hallucinatory trip into poppy-fuelled purgatory alongside Kerrigan’s Tommy and amid rolling clouds of dry ice the like of which I haven’t experienced since my teenage clubbing years of the 1980s.

Clad in Richard Gellar’s beguiling period costumes, Rambert’s dancers move lithely and athletically across, around and beneath Moi Tran’s intriguing set which sits on the Empire’s stage, and which hides a waist-height trench from which bodies suddenly emerge or into which they appear to pour in one sinuous motion.

Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby is described as a ‘dance theatre event’ and it’s certainly that – a shimmering, stygian storytelling spectacle that manages to be savage but also unexpectedly tender.

Catch it at the Empire all week. But remember please – no photos, no phones, no fighting.