How a former Midlands mining town inspired must see play
Beth Steel's play tackles themes of social history, bigotry and family secrets through the story of a wedding. Ria Chatterjee went with the playwright to the place that inspired her play.
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Channel 4
25-07-2025
- Channel 4
How a former Midlands mining town inspired must see play
Making a drama out of a crisis – Till the Stars Come Down is both a political and highly personal tale – set in a former mining town in the Midlands. Beth Steel's play tackles themes of social history, bigotry and family secrets through the story of a wedding. Ria Chatterjee went with the playwright to the place that inspired her play.
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Daily Mail
If you attend one family wedding this summer, make it Beth Steel's rich, raucous bash, in Till The Stars Come Down
If you attend one family wedding this summer, make it Beth Steel's rich, raucous bash, in Till The Stars Come Down - says Georgina Brown Till The Stars Come Down (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) Verdict: Putting the raw into raucous Rating: A mirror ball hangs above the stage. It's party time. Beneath it is a circled arena. Cue conflict. 'Wouldn't be much of a wedding without a punch-up,' says one of the guests. And so it turns out in Beth Steel's rich, raucous, raw play. The play's title echoes W. H. Auden's poem Death's Echo, its concerns perfectly caught by another line: 'The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews'. 'I'm so excited I could pee glitter!' cries Maggie, one of three grown-up sisters preparing for 'our Sylvia's' wedding to Polish Marek. Peeing, pooping, sex ponds (aka hot tubs) and the deforestation (or not) of body hair are the matter for their hilarious chatter. Feelings are tightly zipped. Working-class, post-industrial Nottinghamshire is an unusual location for a West End play. But this is doubtless the first time that an actor on the stage of the Theatre Royal has pulled up her hideous spray-on frock and pulled down her bladder-crushing Spanx and hurled them into the stalls. Calm before the storm: Drink flows, and it will come to blows, at Marek and Sylvia's wedding reception, in Till The Stars Come Down at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket Each of Steel's sharply-drawn, marvellously real characters nurses a secret sadness. Sinead Matthews' bride-to-be is dreamy, subdued, reflecting on the past. Back in the Eighties, Sylvia's ex-miner dad crossed the picket line, triggering a 40-year feud with his strike-supporting brother. Marek arrived in the UK with a few quid and is now offering jobs to redundant locals too proud to take them. Maggie left the town suddenly, without explanation. Auntie-climax: Dorothy Atkinson, as outrageous Aunt Carol, dominates the dance floor Dodgy reception: Well refreshed guests shake their booties in Till The Stars Come Down Even Auntie Carol (Dorothy Atkinson, of Call The Midwife and The Gold), their dead mum's best friend, and a woman with an outrageous, unfiltered opinion about everything, has a bleeding heart. Director Bijan Sheibani's superbly performed production, originally staged in the round at the National, feels confined and constrained by the Theatre Royal's proscenium arch until the second half when everyone is loaded and legless and the torrent of pent-up resentment, rivalries, bitterness, bigotry and disappointment overflows. Highly recommended. Until September 27 ( GEORGINA BROWN
Telegraph
10-07-2025
- Telegraph
This riveting play about England's demonised working-class is a West End triumph
Beth Steel's acclaimed Olivier-nominated play about three sisters from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire – who josh, stress and wrangle on the wedding day of the youngest, Sylvia, to Polish incomer Marek – has lost none of its winning comedy and searing melancholy, or its relevance in its portrayal of post-industrial Britain, in this well-deserved West End transfer. That said, Bijan Sheibani's production was seen to its best advantage in-the-round at the National's Dorfman last year; its intimacy made everyone feel part of the emotionally volatile occasion – augmented beyond the normal marital jitters by issues related to immigration, job insecurity, relationship breakdown and the long shadow of the miners' strike. There's on-stage seating at the Theatre Royal Haymarket but the cast – impeccably led again by Sinead Matthews as Sylvia, the sweetly vulnerable bride, with some new faces – have their work cut out keeping the main auditorium on-side. Still, it remains a manifestly riveting evening, a testament to the actors' ability to invest larger-than-life ebullience with truthfulness, and to the subject matter's rare immediacy. Steel is looking theatrically at an under-represented white working-class community, from which she herself comes (she grew up in Warsop, near Mansfield). Consequently, there's a palpable authenticity to her family drama – the three sisters and their father Tony, a former miner, each face their own struggles while also quietly grieving the loss of their mother. Further, without trowelling on political points about the so-called Red Wall (Mansfield swung from Labour to the Tories after almost a century in 2017, and has since returned to Labour but also seen a surge in support for Reform), Steel taps into a wider mood of uncertainty, resentment and yearning for change. Once again, I'm struck by her concision – the way glancing exchanges amid the fluttering chit-chat of the big day can hit home. There's no diatribe about Thatcher, but when Philip Whitchurch's Uncle Pete – estranged from his brother Tony ever since the miners' strike – recites the names of closed pits, he spirits up a vanished world, with all its former masculine certainties. Likewise, when Julian Kostov's Marek, the handsome, industrious, socially isolated bridegroom, defends his fellow Poles' work-ethic ('You need to decide if you're a victim or superior because you can't be both'), the tensions around immigration, on both sides, are conveyed so succinctly it's like a slap in the face. Yes, you can see some joins in the script, when the group spar and confront each other, as the booze flows and inhibition slackens. Aisling Loftus's Maggie carries a guilty secret that inevitably rocks her siblings, while Leanne, daughter of Lucy Black's unhappily married Hazel (the third sister), is primed to become a catalyst of upset, too. And yet for all the concerted twists and turns, from pre-nuptial flapping to a final tableau of anguish, the casual complexity of ordinary life predominates: one moment it's coarse humour and cackles, the next a consciousness of immense spans of time, and the mysteries of the universe. Between Dorothy Atkinson's incorrigibly outspoken aunt and Alan Williams' endearingly taciturn father stands Matthews' Sylvia, so hopeful but so fragile, trying to hold everything together; she's all of us, in a way.
