Latest news with #BethSteel
Channel 4
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
- Entertainment
- 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
- Entertainment
- 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.
Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Till the Stars Come Down review — a modern classic conquers the West End
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, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Times
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Beth Steel: I left school at 16. Now my play's heading to the West End
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?''
