Till the Stars Come Down review — a modern classic conquers the West End

Times

09-07-2025

Can a play that started life in such an intimate space survive the move to the grand old lady that is the Theatre Royal Haymarket? Much as I enjoyed Beth Steel's wedding party drama when it had its premiere at the National's Dorfman auditorium last year, I did wonder if the stunning ensemble interplay would work so well in its new home.
Well, I needn't have worried. The festivities bubble along just as energetically: this is a drama where boozed-up humour gives way to waves of anger and anguish in a split second. If anything, the more expansive setting means the occasionally self-conscious thrusts of pure theatricality, when realism gives way to sudden flights of visual poetry, actually seem even more convincing. On a second viewing, Steel's portrait of a working-class community in red wall Nottinghamshire, immaculately directed by Bijan Sheibani (who set out his crowd control credentials in Barber Shop Chronicles), looks even more of a modern classic.
There have been a few changes in the cast yet the group dynamic remains every bit as potent. Sinead Matthews reprises her role as Sylvia, the pert young bride of a Polish immigrant who is lifting himself a rung or two up the ladder through sheer hard work. Lucy Black returns as her abrasive and prejudiced sister Hazel, while Aisling Loftus has taken over as the third sister Maggie, whose wayward romantic nature plants a bomb under the family gathering. Dorothy Atkinson now has the plum part of the ultra-raunchy Aunty Carol, who has a Lily Savage-like bon mot for every occasion.
Steel touches on some profound themes: community versus individualism, the weight of the past and the promise of the future, the loss of traditional jobs and, of course, the effect of immigration. Yet she never succumbs to the temptation to lecture. True, Sylvia's true love, Marek (now played by The White Lotus's Julian Kostov) is almost too noble and decent a striver, yet the scene where he seems on the verge of falling from grace still brought gasps from the audience.
If you want to be completely immersed in the action, you have the option of sitting on stage. (Be warned that the revelry gets very, ahem, passionate at times.) Samal Blak's unfussy set design uses little beyond a glitterball and a patch of artificial turf encompassed by a circle of light. Gareth Fry's sound design adds a dancefloor anthem yet punctuates the mayhem with decorous fragments of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (which don't sound at all hackneyed in this context) to remind us that life's clock is always ticking.
Steel's writing is a magnificent combination of earthiness and explosions of half-suppressed emotion. Alan Williams's lugubrious widowed father of the bride is just one of the characters who suddenly blossom into eloquence. It's a mighty achievement. As the night rolls on, fragments of real life spill in front of us like splinters of light from the glitterball.★★★★★140minTheatre Royal Haymarket, London, to Sep 27, tillthestarscomedown.com
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