Till the Stars Come Down by Beth Steel. Theatre Royal, Haymarket, until 27th September 2025, 4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan.
Till the Stars Come Down by Beth Steel. Theatre Royal, Haymarket, until 27th September 2025,
4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
“A wedding from hell.”
It is grim up north in this state of the nation play about a disastrous wedding breakfast held in Mansfield by Sylvia who is marrying a Pole called Marek who the family do not know at all well. It is a one time mining town, there is a substantial Polish group who have come after joining the European Union, and instead of the pits people toil in the warehouses of Sports Direct. It is 2023 and things are fraught. As with many weddings all hell duly breaks loose. Dad, a retired miner, cannot bring himself to actually call his new son in law by his name, while the bride's sisters Hazel and Maggie, who have come to help her, have problems of their own, and Aunt Carol (Dorothy Atkinson, resplendent in purple0 causes more havoc by messing up the top table place settings. It is very funny, laden with bad language, and at the end rather sad with the groom, after being accused of molesting one teenage daughter – she kissed him, said he kissed her – having been beaten up by her Dad and is in hospital with a broken nose. Dad and Uncle Pete are at odds because during the miner's strike Dad was a scab, and their relationship is as fraught as that of the sisters. It is soap opera stuff in a way but speeds along under director Bjijan Shelbani beautifully – the transfer from the National theatre's world of cement to this classic Victorian theatre works perfectly, the action on stage being watched by audiences at the side and back so it is in effect done in the round. Well performed by a fine cast it manages to make Dteel's points about the state of the nation amid the soap opera disasters as a marriage disintegrates, children misbehave and that old aunt does what they always do – causes trouble.
Cast
Dorothy Atkinson – Aunt Carol
Lucy Black – Hazel
Adrian Bower – John
Julian Kostov – Marek
Maggie – Aisling Loftus
Sinead Matthews – Sylvia
Ruby Thompson – Leanne.
Philip Whiychurch – Uncle Peter
AlanWilliams – Tony
Lillie Babb, Elodie Bloomfield, Cadence Williams – Sarah
Creatives
Director – Bijan Shelbani
Set & Costume Designer – Samai Blak
Lighting Designer – Paule Constable
Sound designer – Gareth Frye
Revival Director – Elin Schofield
Dialect Coach – Charmian Hoare
Intimacy Director – Asha Jennings-Grant
Fight Director – Kev McCurdy
