Beth Steel: I left school at 16. Now my play's heading to the West End

Times

2 days ago

When Beth Steel was growing up in Warsop, a coal mining town in Nottinghamshire, she didn't think her father's job was interesting. 'Everybody's dad worked down the pits,' the playwright says. It was only years later, when she was living in London, that she became curious.
'My dad was in the mine from the age of 17, seven days a week. It was part of his identity. When the pits started to close he considered moving to Australia because it still had pits — he couldn't imagine himself doing anything else.'
Conversations with her father informed Steel's play Till the Stars Come Down. It grapples with the struggles of those like her dad and the hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs as the mines closed. After sold-out success at the National Theatre last year, the play is transferring to the West End.
The action takes place at a wedding in Mansfield, near Warsop. Local girl Sylvia is marrying Marek, from Poland, whose name her father struggles to remember. Steel says her starting point was the marriage scene in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter — 'all these customs and dances and alcohol and ceremony and joy, and lots of things bubbling'.
Through the lens of a family drama, Steel explores what happens when an industry so intertwined with the identity of a place no longer exists. There's a moving scene where Sylvia's uncle lists the closed pits like a chant, making it plain that he can't move on. Meanwhile, Marek is part of a growing eastern European population in the area. Last month the Reform party won Warsop's council election, promising to limit immigration, making the play even more topical.
'A decade ago I wouldn't have thought a story from my town was something a stage would want,' Steel says when we meet at the National. Amid the West End's revivals and star vehicles, it is something of an exception — although there is a sprinkling of celebrity: Julian Kostov, one of the ripped Russians in the latest White Lotus, has joined the cast as Marek. 'Be still my beating heart,' Steel says.
An energetic fast-talker dressed all in blue with thigh-high satin ultramarine boots, Steel lives in east London with her partner. She agrees her play is 'a state-of-the-nation drama', but reluctantly, because 'I hate the term — it always feels too grand and definitive about what a nation is.
'But where I'm from represents a flashpoint in British politics. Nobody knows what to do with these towns and it's interesting to dig into those fault lines. I understand fury about Brexit, and fury about Reform, but we have to be able to see how other people think.'
It was a West End play that made Steel become a writer. She was in her mid-twenties and a friend suggested they see Blackbird by the Scottish playwright David Harrower. 'It had never occurred to me to be a playwright,' she says. 'I'm not one of those precocious writers who have been scribbling away forever, but within 15 minutes the atoms within me were changed.'
She had been working as a waitress ('at the Groucho club: I saw a lot of very drunk people'), having left school at 16, three days after taking her GCSEs. In her teens she moved to Greece with her identical twin sister, now an artist, to live with her aunt.
'You're not allowed to do that now,' she says, laughing. 'I loved school — I'd create my own homework if I didn't get enough. But nobody in my family had been to university so it didn't feel like an expectation — going to Greece was as valuable.' It was her home until she was 21; she modelled fur coats and set up a clothes shop. 'I know,' she says, when I ask why fur coats in sunny Athens? 'It was as bonkers as it sounds.'
Does she wish she had stayed at school for her A-levels? 'Quite the opposite. It's easy to say this because I am making a living but you need life experience to write. I'm like a magpie.'
Breaking into theatre took guts. 'The first time I went to the Royal Court [in London] I was intimidated,' Steel says. 'I got my ticket, I looked at the people at the bar and it felt frightening. I didn't dare go down there.'
What mattered though was that the Royal Court had a programme she could send a script to — which is how she got her first break, joining a writers' group there.
Steel still thinks theatre is the most democratic art form to get into. 'If I was an extraordinary painter I couldn't just send my painting to the Tate. But you can submit a play to the National and someone will read it.' She hasn't had a television in 15 years and shows no interest in branching into TV like her fellow Nottinghamshire playwright James Graham.
Being in the West End will bring a broader audience, she says. While ticket prices can be astronomically high, the West End is doing better than Broadway, attracting nearly five million more people last year — but it is still stretched and new plays like Steel's are a risk. 'There's a pressure to have star power and that is why 95 per cent of shows secure the casting first,' Steel says. 'This is on through the sheer force of the play, cast and production, which is rare.'
While she is proud of where she's from, and amused that Indhu Rubasingham, the new artistic director of the National Theatre, is from Mansfield, she doesn't want her work to be defined by it. 'I don't want to diss 'grim up-north drama' but I want lives and voices that could be in a Tennessee Williams or a Chekhov play,' she says.
The day after we meet Steel is off to Japan, where Till the Stars Come Down has also transferred. It has been on in Greece and she was pleasantly taken aback at how universal the story of her town proved. 'It's about family, love, immigration, change, fear of the future — and weddings and drinking,' she says with a smile. She is less sure of how a line about hot tubs being 'cauldrons of sperm' will translate in Japan, she says, hooting. 'They'll wonder, 'What do those English people get up to?''