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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
