This riveting play about England's demonised working-class is a West End triumph

Telegraph

10-07-2025

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.