Twopence Coloured
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By Patrick Hamilton
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‘I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific’ Sarah Waters
‘If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man’ Nick Hornby
Patrick Hamilton’s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne’s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.
West Kensington – grey area of rot, and caretaking, and cat-slinking basements. West Kensington – drab asylum for the driven and cast-off genteel!’ Patrick Hamilton was acutely conscious that his third novel (first published in 1928) was longer and ‘much grimmer’ than his previous and well-received productions. Twopence Coloured is the story of nineteen-year-old Jackie Mortimer, who leaves Hove in search of a life on the London stage, only to become entangled in ‘provincial theatre’ and complex affairs of the heart with two brothers, Richard and Charles Gissing. The novel, unavailable for many years, is a gimlet-eyed portrait of the theatrical vocation, and fully exhibits Hamilton’s celebrated gift for conjuring London – the ’vast, thronged, unknown, hooting, electric-lit, dark-rumbling metropolis.
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This was the second novel Hamilton wrote when he was 24. While his best work was yet to come the qualities which make him such a compelling writer are here. He was fascinated by the theatre (he wrote wo outstanding plays, Gaslight and Rope) which often features in his novels but this is centred entirely on it.
What he experienced he put into his books and if his style has yet to develop and he overdoes his Komic Kapitals, here we are experiencing London and provincial theatre from a century ago.
If Jackie, the central character, is having a bath by candlelight in a Cardiff slum while touring in Wales it's because Hamilton himself did so at some point. The hum of the traffic the green gaslights firing up in the streets on a winter's afternoon, the clatter of plates in cafes, the coldness of rooms in digs - it's all here because it was all there in his life. Fabulous.
