'Till the Stars Come Down' review — this terrific wedding drama is a wild, beautiful piece of theatre

Read our review of Beth Steel's comic play Till the Stars Come Down, now in performances at the Theatre Royal Haymarket to 27 September.

“A wedding, what’s a wedding? / It’s a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever,” rattles the bride in Stephen Sondheim’s Company. However, New York neuroses have nothing on this saga set in the former mining town of Shirebrook (on the boundary between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire), where 70% of the wider constituency voted Leave in the 2016 referendum and, in 2019, Labour MP and former miner Dennis Skinner, who had represented the area since 1970 (and was a Brexit supporter himself), was unseated by a Tory.

Transferring from the National Theatre’s intimate Dorfman space to the much larger Theatre Royal Haymarket, Nottinghamshire native Beth Steel’s play Till the Stars Come Down is a tangy, multi-layered soap opera presented in a terrifically theatrical production by Bijan Sheibani that’s staged in the round (designed by Samal Blak) with a disco ball at the centre. Whether the characters are throwing shapes on the dance floor, creating a human solar system or having a blazing row, the tone is always matched by Paule Constable’s superb lighting.

There are no men present for much of the first act, which is filled with rollers, lipstick, Buck’s Fizz and other accoutrements. Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is getting ready to marry Marek, a Polish immigrant and up-and-coming business owner, following a whirlwind romance. Her sisters are the harassed Hazel (Lucy Black), mother of teenage Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and little Sarah (Elodie Bromfield on press night), whose husband John is out of work, and hedonistic Maggie (Aisling Loftus), who suddenly moved away about a year ago.

Matthews’s Sylvia is ethereal in her late mother’s ’70s flower child-style wedding dress and heartbreaking as she comes to terms with an irreparable family rift. Hazel’s bigotry towards immigrants of course isn’t excusable but Black does compellingly demonstrate the fear that drives it, and Loftus vividly illustrates Maggie’s hunger for attention – she married one of her four husbands because he looked at her as if she was “a potato in a famine”.

The marvellous comic creation Aunty Carol played by the wonderful Dorothy Atkinson (who resembles Lesley Manville, a shoo-in for the role in any film adaptation) is a bona fide scene-stealer. A veritable whirlwind of corporeal and idiosyncratic one-liners (“Growing older is like cottage cheese – it isn’t as scary as it looks”) in a kaftan and curlers and then a flashy purple ensemble, she’s an uber “Karen” and stirrer who lives for the drama.

The groom Marek (Julian Kostov), who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps but has no family present and doesn’t seem to have any friends either, is largely a cipher (albeit a goofy one who performs his own version of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”), while the interfamilial adultery plot is probably the least compelling storyline.

More compellingly, the community is still scarred by the miners’ strikes and ensuing closures (the local pit is now a dispatching warehouse). Uncle Pete (Philip Whitchurch) recites the names of the closed pits like an invocation and can’t forgive anyone who crossed the line during the strike, including his own brother Tony (Alan Williams), the bereft father of the bride.

It's a play about three sisters at the end of their tethers, but Chekhov would never be so salty in his language, nor would he throw a pair of Spanx into the audience like a bouquet. A wild, messy and beautiful piece of theatre.

Till the Stars Come Down is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket to 27 September. Book Till the Stars Come Down tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Till the Stars Come Down (Photos by Manuel Harlan)