FringeReview UK 2024

Till the Stars Come Down

National Theatre, with thanks to the Arete Foundation

Genre: Comedic, Contemporary, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Theatre

Venue: National Theatre, Dorfman

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Three sisters, the youngest’s wedding, artificially-buried histories around Mansfield’s scarred former mining town. Buried quotes too: the title for one thing. Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down directed by Bejon Sheibani at the NT’s Dorfman till March 16^th  follows Steel’s superb Wonderland (2014) and House of Shades (2022), also set in Nottinghamshire.

Each charts working-class decline: betrayal, assimilation, abandonment, shafts of joy. Here it’s through a wedding. Like House of Shades, themes refract through one family. Like these plays it has claims to be a masterpiece. Less epic than either, more intimate it asks how many histories deep can a community survive? Less horizontal in time, it’s vertical and doesn’t strain for metaphors. Till the Stars Come Down covers not decades but a single day. Politics too is less foregrounded.

Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Marek (Marc Wootton) one of the Polish immigrant community. Elder sister Hazel (Lucy Black) doesn’t think it’ll last, hinting xenophobia.

Her husband John (Derek Riddell), tired of Hazel’s horizons finds affinities with middle sister Maggie (Lisa McGrillis). Who’s mysteriously moved away, dropping a good job. Why would anyone move? Sheer stasis is a given: to break it a taboo.

Taboos surround father Tony (Alan Williams) still mourning his wife. Many years ago, he crossed lines so his brother Uncle Pete (Philip Whitchurch) never speaks to him. Striker or scab, it made no difference. All like Steel’s own father were made redundant.

Steel lets this unfold throughout the day as glasses are raised, tempers and passions with them. With the Dorfman in courtyard mode, Samal Blak’s set features a turf with a white circle marking a revolve. Vague resemblances to a football pitch aren’t enlarged on – though most of the action’s set on an outdoor wedding reception with circular table and later a smorgasbord.

But we open as Sylvia’s hair is blown around by Hazel whose hyper-aware 14-year-old daughter Leanne (Ruby Stokes) scampers round younger sister Sarah (Maggie Livermore on this occasion) whilst their Aunty Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne) arrives full of vibrant body metaphors like: ”I’ve gained four pound. It’s all gone on my knockers and can I shift it?” Carol’s tacit self-congratulation posing as self-deprecation sexualises her in Ashbourne’s stand-out performance.

Steel’s kerning of “pound” too is just a taster of conflations like “gunner” or brilliant riffs like “he’d shag a frog”, a neighbour’s hot-tub a “sex pond”, or Carol’s exchange with Maggie exploring that they’ve far more in common than Maggie realises, who’s riposted of Hazel: ”She can hear a gnat shagging. This is my home.” “Then you won’t want to burn it to ground” Carol returns, who can reflect: “I don’t know my arsehole from my fanny this morning.” Or Hazel’s equally frank (to Maggie)”I wouldn’t mind getting my ankles over his shoulders tonight” of a DJ. Equally Marek’s idiomatic English, as to John exhorting him to “be superior or victim”.

But there’s wondrous set-pieces too, set literally in motion by Maggie’s startling assertion the sun and moon are the same body. Cue Uncle Pete’s arranging everyone to twirl like the solar system, and Leanne’s visionary moment, predicting what happens and the end of the world as a lantern obediently catches fire, unheard by anyone. Or Marek’s reporting how pigs scream knowing they’re “doomed” and never eating pork.

There’s room for exploratory duets between the bridal couple, Carol and Tony (she’s married to his brother Pete), Maggie and John and Marek and Leanne. It’s these that set up crises, one linked to the other.

All are exemplary, though there’s four outstanding performances. Ashbourne’s sovereign, larger than life, the “sun” in Pete’s system. Matthews gravitates there by stealth, exhibiting wedding-day nerves as she blossoms briefly out of anxiety to passion then explodes at accusations.

McGrillis nails Maggie’s equivocal fear of her own feelings, Carol’s equal in many things including language, with that spectacular gap in knowledge. Black’s unsympathetic Hazel though emerges with the greatest intensity of all: someone frightened of loss with a harrowing epiphany after seeing an overturned car which she revisits:  “To drive past the wreck. I want us to have survived.”

Stokes enjoys private visionary moments, trying to order things in her dread of catastrophe, bringing it closer. Livermore’s winningly got far more to do than most at her age. Wootton’s large gestural Marek, hesitant then unstoppable in slant eloquence is matched by Williams’ wry emotionally-sussed Tony, and  Whitchurch’s Pete, with a doxology of closed mines and his spatial re-ordering of the world. Riddell’s haunted John is only alive when away from nearly everyone else.

Paule Constable’s lighting shifts from interiors to bright noon, a glint as Blak’s rain-shower interrupts, and disco-effects. There’s intimacy (Asha Jennings-Grant) and as Leanne predicts fisticuffs several times (Kev McCurdy’s fight direction). The soundtrack too – riffing off the storm in Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ is memorably worked in and out with bangers in Gareth Fry’s sound.

The quote from Auden’s 1936 ‘Death’s Echo’ throws up a wild hedonism seen in the very last moments: ‘dance,  till the stars come down from the rafters/dance, dance dance till you drop.’ Joy and terror whirl to apotheosis in this one-day carousel of living and loving to your limits. Even this early, it’s safe to predict we’ll look back at the end of 2024 and proclaim it as one of the year’s finest.

Published February 8, 2024February 8, 2024 by Simon Jenner