Review: TILL THE STARS COME DOWN, Theatre Royal Haymarket
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan
Now we’re deep into wedding season, the timing could not be more perfect for the triumphant West End transfer of Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down. Newly decorated with an Olivier Award nomination, this production is a tender and raw depiction of family love.
Over the course of two and a half hours, we see the giddy lead up through to the messy emotional fallout of Sylvia and Marek’s wedding. Steel captures the unique tension of a close family gathering – a sort of dull dread underpinning the outward excitement of the wedding guests, all tip-toeing around the unspeakable. Till The Stars Come Down is a celebration of love in all its complexity – its impossible strength and fragility, its pain and its joy.
Bijan Sheibani’s direction and Samal Blak’s set design work closely together to bring the intimacy of the Dorfman to the imposing proscenium of the Haymarket. As an audience member, the delicious discomfort and cringing tension unfolding on the top table really makes it feel as though you are hours into the most anxiety-inducing wedding of your life!
The opening scene of the family getting ready together is a masterful piece of exposition – introducing with pace and raucous wit the central cast of characters, their relationships, their class and the tone of the play. The sibling relationship between the three sisters (Lucy Black, Aisling Loftus and Sinéad Matthews) bookends the play and is by far its most developed and engaging theme. Steel weaves in other broader themes from the wider world, including the local history of industrial action, tensions around immigration, unemployment and infidelity, but few if any of these messages are worked through as thoroughly as the sisterly bond.
Hailing originally from Mansfield, playwright Beth Steel shares a working class family background with those onstage, and the play emanates warmth and affection for those roots. Translated to Theatre Royal Haymarket and pitched to a West End theatre audience (with all their associated privileges), one wonders if the hair curlers, pints and brash humour could be read as teetering on the brink of caricature. There’s perhaps a question to be posed about what this play is trying to convey to this particular audience about this particular family.
Nevertheless, Beth Steel’s play is outrageously funny and shockingly vulnerable. A whirlwind of a show – don’t miss your chance to see this celebrated smash hit.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
