Theatre review: Till The Stars Come Down

Beth Steel's Till The Stars Come Down has been compared to Chekhov, and though it owes as much to Coronation Street it does centre on three sisters: In a Northern former coalmining town Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) are helping youngest sister Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) get ready for her wedding. While Hazel lives down the road with her husband John (Adrian Bower) and teenage daughters Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and Sarah (Cadence Williams, alternating with Lillie Babb and Elodie Blomfield,) and Maggie rather abruptly moved away for work some months earlier, Sylvia has stayed at home ever since their mother's death, keeping their father Tony (Alan Williams) company. So her wedding represents both moving on from the past, and a day where she can be the focus of attention rather than the supportive one, but she's got a bad feeling something's going to go wrong.

She thinks this might have been got out of the way when she can't fit into her dress and dusts off their mother's wedding dress instead, but there's clues that family tensions might cause much bigger problems: The family, and especially the vitriolic Hazel, snipe about too many foreigners coming into town, barely holding themselves back when they remember Sylvia's fiancé Marek (Julian Kostov) is Polish.

With most of the play taking place at the reception as the guests get increasingly drunk, Steel's play successfully moves between joyous moments, long-standing resentments, tension and explosive revelations: Most of the cast get some funny lines but the lion's share go to Aunty Carol (Dorothy Atkinson,) so overbearing she's willing to rearrange the top table behind the bride's back to put herself on it. On the flipside the modern political tensions are matched by historic ones, as Tony and his brother Pete (Philip Whitchurch) haven't spoken in decades, for reasons reminiscent of James Graham's Sherwood.

Bijan Sheibani's production plays in the round, Samal Blak's design having placed some of the audience onstage to sometimes stand in for wedding guests (and occasional foils for Aunty Carol to be sick on.) It successfully juggles the comedy and drama, and manages a lot of laugh-out-loud moments as well as gasps at some of the crueller twists the family are willing to put each other through. It still feels like soap opera (the cliffhanger into the interval reveals Maggie left town because she'd fallen in love with her sister's husband) but one at the top of its game, able to juggle these mood changes along with social commentary.

Till The Stars Come Down by Beth Steel is booking until the 27th of September at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.