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The playwright Beth Steel has said she doesn’t just want to write “grim up-north” dramas, and her latest work Till the Stars Come Down — transferring to the West End after a sold-out run at the National Theatre — is certainly not grim. Bawdy and hilarious, the play is set on a wedding day close to where Steel grew up in a former coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire. The bride is Sylvia (Sinead Matthews), who has summoned Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) to help her get ready. They don’t know the man Sylvia is marrying well — Marek (Julian Kostov) is Polish, and Hazel isn’t thrilled about the number of Polish men now living in the area — but they want to muck in anyway: they’re sisters, their bond is unbreakable.
Over the next couple of hours, as the wedding guests neck buck’s fizz and wiggle to “Toxic” by Britney Spears, that bond is put to the test. Into the mix, mainly to make mischief and land the spiciest jokes of the play, bowls the sisters’ aunt Carol (Dorothy Atkinson). A magisterial embodiment of the poem “When I’m old, I shall wear purple”, Carol claims she is basically the sisters’ mother (their own is dead), though they don’t seem quite to agree. When she muscles in on the top table at the wedding breakfast, the reaction isn’t unfettered joy.
This is without question a state-of-the-nation play filled with big issues: immigration, the unwillingness of native English to do hard work (an argument advanced, unwisely, by Marek), the immiseration of formerly purposeful British towns. Hazel’s daughter (Ruby Thompson) has no hopes for her future: she’ll probably work in a warehouse, she says, looking up from her phone for once; they’re always taking people.
But the play wears its seriousness lightly. Steel is able to get her characters to embody problems affecting the country without robbing them of vivacity: they feel like actual people you might share a train carriage with. Carol is a barnstormer, and Hazel is especially well drawn, thanks to Black’s humane and complicated performance. The family’s sole breadwinner, Hazel is nursing a secret heartbreak: her husband (Adrian Bower) can barely look at her. “I’d love to have a bad day,” she cries at one point — but as she knows, she can’t, because the fragile edifice of her family depends entirely on her.
It’s worth stressing how very rude and sweary the play is, and at times it does feel that it’s laying on its northernness with a trowel for an audience that would rather watch plays about the north than actually visit. Still, it builds to a beautifully choreographed finale that is both soapy and deeply moving. Its run in the West End is brief: don’t miss it.
★★★★☆
To September 27, tillthestarscomedown.com
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