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- [00:00]
Mickey Jo
Now, when a play in a traditional proscenium venue adds onstage seating, I absolutely recommend sitting in that onstage seating. What I don't recommend is arriving so early that you are alone on the front row centrally of the OnStage seating, watching four tiers of an auditorium gradually fill up and watch you alone on the stage as a sad disco ball slowly revolves. Just a little bit conspicuous, but worth it for terrific theatre. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre and today I'm very excited to tell you about a particularly thrilling play that I saw last week at the Theatre Royal Haymarket for its West End opening night. It is transferring from the National Theatre where it was already quite acclaimed. It is the new play by Beth Steele, Till the Stars Come Down. It is a British family drama. I'm going to be letting you know all about it today. We're going to talk about the performances, the themes, and we're going to talk about its cultural accessibility as well. Now, in the past, the way I tend to structure these reviews as I might talk about the synopsis and expand on the themes of the play a little bit, talk about the creative choices and then finish by talking about the performances. Because there are spoilers within this that you may or may not want to know. I'm going to structure this review a little bit differently and we're going to have a spoiler free section followed by a spoiler full section. So if you'd like, you can listen to the first part before you go and see this play for yourself. Go and enjoy it personally and then come back and listen to the rest. Or you can listen to the whole thing after you go, or you can listen to the whole thing before you get it's entirely up to you. I don't want to tell you. I don't want to tell you what to do with your time. Now of course, if you are one of those people who has already seen this play, or if you saw the previous iteration at the National Theatre, I would love to know what you think as well. So please share all of your thoughts in the comments section down below. And as always, if you enjoy listening to this review and you want to hear my thoughts on other West End and Broadway shows, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on channel notifications so that YouTube lets you know every time I share a new video, which is reasonably often. Or you can go follow me on podcast platforms. In the meantime, let's talk about Till the Stars Come Down. So let's begin with my spoiler free thoughts and I will give you a little bit of an introductory synopsis and overview about the events and themes of this play and as you may be able to tell by the program artwork. If you are watching this as a video it is set at a wedding and it is the wedding of the youngest of three sisters in a very working class family in critically a deindustrialized East Midlands mining town to a Polish immigrant named Marik who has recently started his own business after years of toil and after decades of European immigration to the area. And the setting of this play, as well as the makeup of this family immediately engenders the whole thing to certain characteristics. And without referencing them all directly, Beth Steele's writing here speaks profoundly to several of the last major societal events in the uk, including but not limited to the closure of many major mines in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher's government and the impact on mining towns and those communities, as well as the 2016 Brexit referendum with the link between the two, as well as a huge component of this play being unemployment. Unemployment, the thing which creates challenges and anxieties for working class families, leaving them poised for radicalization against anyone who is considered to be taking away their jobs. From there we get underlying tensions that effervesce into full blown xenophobia, but we don't get there straight away. We begin with the three sisters as well as the two daughters of the eldest and their aunt who surprises them all getting ready for the wedding. It's the youngest of the three who is getting married. This is also going to be the time when she moves out of the family home. We come to understand that she has been staying with and caring for their elderly father in the wake of their mother's death. We learn about this very early on. The eldest of the sisters is trying to wrangle an unruly family life and her very stubborn daughters amidst financial challenges, and the middle sister had moved away not too long ago and has returned for the wedding and is being uncharacteristically tight lipped about the reasons for all of this, and also uncharacteristically is refusing a morning alcoholic drink prompting people to wonder if she's pregnant. She insists that she isn't, but clearly something is going on which is very much in the nature of the first scene of this play. We can tell that there is a lot happening beneath the surface and there Are things that we aren't yet privy to as an audience. There are realities that these characters on stage are not yet privy to about each other. There are things which are going to come to light as there are in the best of family dramas. And a family drama is exactly what this is. I think one of the smartest choices about this play is to theatricalize the most honest glimpses into. Into personalities and characters that you get at a wedding. In those moments of anxiety beforehand when they're all getting ready. In the moment of release afterwards. We don't see the ceremony. We see the preparation. We see the tension all building. Is she going to fit into the dress? Are the daughters going to get dressed on time? And the stress of all of this is bringing out a certain amount of truth and clarity. Among these sisters. I mentioned their aunt has arrived to surprise them as well. This because their mother couldn't be there. And she felt as though she had a responsibility. We immediately understand that she is something of a character. She has a very colorful personality. And she has come armed with an extraordinary and very colorful hat. And while she could be perhaps the most exuberant personality on stage. None of them are what you would call shy and retiring. Everyone is opinionated and determined to make themselves heard. Perfect ingredients for all of the drama. And the chaos that is going to follow from there. We skip to the wedding reception a little into the first act. And everything sort of follows along. And it's there where I'm going to end the synopsis. But I'll tell you a little bit more about what the play is like. And I mentioned how smart I thought it was to choose those moments of the wedding day to theatricalize in order to bring out the truth and the revelation In a combination of the emotional release of it all and celebration and coming together. And also the awkwardness of having to come back together. And family reunions with people who no longer speak. And who weren't necessarily looking forward to seeing each other. Or had been trying to avoid each other. And, you know, the things that we do choose to say in front of our family. And the things that we don't choose to say. All of this at play. But it also provides us with that classic setting of family dramas, the dinner table. And I've spoken about this a lot recently. And things that become a placeholder for the family drama. Dinner table within a play. And the wedding reception. Top Table is a great and dramatic example of one of those spaces. Because as stressful and uncomfortable as it is to have an argument around the Dinner table to do so at the top table at a wedding, when you're also on view, surrounded by so many wider friends and family and acquaintances, is dialed all the way up. When you're then having an argument between family members in that setting, then it gets crazy. And speaking of seating, before I forget to mention it, when this play was originally staged at the Dorfman Theatre, one of the three theatrical spaces within the National Theatre here in the uk, it was staged in the round. And so to recapture that energy within its West End transfer, they have at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket added three sides of on stage seating. Only a couple of rows of seating on one side and then just a single row down the other two sides. It's not an awful lot of seats, but it is a pret unique theatrical experience because during the play you get to be incredibly close to the action, basically amongst it. And you also get to glimpse out beyond the proscenium and see this enormous, extraordinary, beautiful auditorium and four tiers of seating. And if anyone is curious about what the onstage seating experience is like, I will tell you because at the very beginning of the play, I really appreciated the proximity to the characters. But as they were getting ready, I was a little bit concerned that too much of it was going to be staged away from us. And you have to assume that that's going to be the priority because you have thousands of people out there and only a small handful of you on the stage. So just numerically speaking, you would assume that they would prioritize looking in the other direction. But after that first 20 minute scene, it's not something I ever thought about or noticed again. In fact, there were a couple of moments where characters are stood at the front of the stage, facing upstage to someone who is looking back at them. So everyone has someone's eyes to dig into during one of those tense scenes where they're not actually saying anything to each other, but everything is coming from their faces and from their eyes. And also during the dinner table scene, the dinner table having long been a challenge to directors. The whole thing is set on a slowly turning revolve. Not only is it spinning steadily out of control, but we get to in turn see the reactions of different characters, different family members as they rotate around. Ingeniously staged. This just one of many brilliant choices from director Bijan Chebani. And so if you have the opportunity to choose to sit on stage, I would absolutely do so. Because there is nothing like being that close to the characters. I quite quickly stopped noticing that they there was an entire audience beyond that fourth wall. Because I was so focused on the facial expressions and the micro expressions and the things that they weren't saying to each other alongside everything that they were. And it's one of those plays where at the beginning you can tell something is amiss. And so you're looking for clues. And then later on you are empowered to know a little bit more than certain characters on stage. And there's a lot of dramatic irony at play. And so you're waiting for multiple pennies to drop like a small, nervous insect trapped in an arcade machine. Pennies raining from the sky. But beyond that, the thing that I think is really cle on stage seating, and I assume a big part of why they wanted to retain it for the West End production, is that we end up being situated not just as an audience on stage, but as the wedding guests, as the people in such proximity to them that the fighting becomes even more noticeable and even more awkward. And they address us as wedding guests at one point. And we complete the set decoration, I guess. The set, which is otherwise made up of a square playing space covered in green Astroturf grass. It is stated to be an outdoor wedding reception, but it's also marked to look a little like a football pitch. There are repeated references to the club which one of them previously worked at, which they've spent an awful lot of time socializing at. It's clearly at the epicenter of the local community. And this could be one of several things. It could be like an ex serviceman's club, not a conservative club, you wouldn't have thought, in that part of the country. Although eventually swang in a certain direction. It could also be a football club. In any case, it's a place where they go to drink and to socialize. But a whole different, more symbolic interpretation of this, perhaps football pitch suggestion is the adversarial nature of what it becomes. Where these family members, who are very aligned at the beginning, are brought into opposition because of the events of the play as they continue this sense of attacking and defense of things which are quite literally about to kick off. And there is hanging above the whole thing an enormous suspended disco ball, which, on a very frivolous note, just has a lovely lighting effect when you light a disco ball. And it's nice looking out into the auditorium and seeing the glow of all of that. And there is some conversation about the stars and about the solar system. They use a revolve to demonstrate that within the stage. That's one of the most striking moments of staging when someone says something clueless about the relationship of the sun and the moon to earth and one of the characters takes it upon himself to educate them about the way the solar system is actually arranged. But that's a really striking visual moment in a play that otherwise doesn't need an awful lot in terms of its direction. It's more about the characters and about this dialogue, dialogue which is incredibly naturalistic. It is very recognizable, it is very relatable, I think, to British audiences. It is also regional British dialogue written so authentically. It's really great to hear that voice caption in such an honest way. And it's down to the little things as well. It's the little details that make this all seem more authentic. How in a moment of real dramatic crisis, you have a character exiting an awkward conversation and muttering to themselves as they're getting ready to leave, right, Bag glasses and checking that they have everything. Or in the midst of all of this drama unfolding, offering to put the kettle on. Because that's the most reassuring thing that you can do as a British person. And because of this and because of the tone of the whole thing, which is a very sort of British soap, not a soap opera. We just call them soaps here. Although I kind of wish we said soap opera because, you know, the drama of it. But the tone of the whole thing, being very British soap esque, being very eastenders, even more like Emmerdale, I think makes it culturally accessible to just about every household in the uk. I think there are so many people who might not traditionally go to the theatre who would love this play, who would find things to recognize in this play and it would foster conversations between generations and it would address a lot of, I think, the issues currently faced by British society. If I'm being completely honest, I think the growing gulf that is the social and political divide in this country that has been weaponized in these needless culture wars by opportunistic politic that all gets very well addressed and very well understood in this play without laboring the point. And most critically, it's the way that it talks about, exposes and finally combats the negative attitude towards immigration and how that closed minded perspective filters down carelessly through the generations. And I found myself thinking about accessibility within the theater a lot recently, which can be anything from with disability, actually being able to enter into the space and relax performances. It can also be financial accessibility and geographical accessibility. This is, you know, tell a Midland story in London. But I think there's also such a thing as cultural accessibility and There have been, however, many plays staged at the likes of the National Theatre and in London's glittering West End, written by the likes of Tom Stoppard, where you can sit in that audience and feel as though you have three too few master's degrees to understand what's happening, or that you might not have the requisite knowledge of history, or, for that matter, philosophy or thermodynamics or whatever else he's deciding to write about. Whereas something like Till the Stars Come down is so readily culturally accessible, not just because the dialogue is conversational and it's talking about themes and events that have been experienced throughout the country and very talked about, and their repercussions have been felt for years, carrying on. But also because the emotions are understandable and recognizable. The setting is understandable and recognizable. We've so many of us been to one of those kinds of family weddings, and we know where the landmines are and we know the things to sidestep, and we know where the potential problems exist. When we see Aunt Carol bringing up chairs to the top table and rearranging the seating plan, we know that something not great is probably about to happen. We also recognize Aunt Carol. We have all seen an Aunt Carol type at weddings who is maybe drinking a little more than she ought to, who is maybe making a little bit of a fool of herself. And I'm very sorry to say that if you haven't seen an Aunt Carol type at weddings, there's a very good chance that you have been the Aunt Carol type at weddings. But we are moving dangerously close to spoiler territory. And before I tell you absolutely anything else about this play, I'm going to issue a spoiler warning. And we are going to move into part two, where I continue to review the play, but this time with spoilers. So you have been warned. Let us continue talking about Till the Stars Come Down. So basically, they all die. I'm joking. That's not what happens. But to talk a little bit more openly about some of these themes, it did make me really think about the American Dream and what the British equivalent of that might be. And you have a lot of characters in this play making choices and potentially upending their comfortable lives, and husbands considering leaving their wives and children in order to find something more fulfilling. And, you know, for a community like this in a part of the country that has perhaps been left thoughtlessly in the jaws of austerity for many years, what does.
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- [17:38]
Mickey Jo
The British Dream look like and this is a play that, as well as really exploring the relationship between these three sisters specifically in that community and among that local identity, takes a good look at what it means for people later in life to suddenly ask for more for themselves to suddenly desire. And if you're wondering where all of this is specifically motivated within the play, I am going to tell you because I mentioned that the middle sister of the three, Maggie, was being a little furtive at the beginning. She is played remarkably by Aisling Loftus, one of the standout performances of the piece, and it's a very winning characterization. From the beginning, she's deeply char. We can understand that she's had a little bit more of a rambunctious past. She's been married multiple times and the jokes are made at her expense by other members of the family. She's the one who had moved away for reasons unclear and has returned for the wedding and was refusing a drink. This is all because she wants to be careful what she's saying. She has a guard up. We later come to find out why because there has been an as yet unconstummated flirtation between her and the husband of her older sister. Sister. Her older sister whose name is Hazel, portrayed by Lucy Black, the eldest sister to end all eldest sisters. She is a force on the stage, brilliantly performed. And it's her husband, John, who has developed a strong romantic attachment to Maggie. John is portrayed by Adrian Boa. He initially seems like a sort of a typical, sullen, unemotional British bloke. But we discover complexities within John. We discover that there is a sense of longing, not just for Maggie, but for the life and the freedom that a relationship with her would represent. Although he scarcely thought the thing through because he has two young daughters with her sister, and as she later points out to him in one of a couple of tortured, passionate exchanges between the two, there is no realistic future for the two of them as a couple. And she is desperately trying to keep him at arm's length because she doesn't want to damage her relationship with her sisters. That's the most important thing to her. Her, even if she is craving something, that would destroy all of that. And that is not the only problem at this wedding. It's not even the only family love triangle at this wedding, because there is a little bit of a parallel with the behavior of Aunt Carol, who clearly, and she later admits this much, had a former flirtation or even a lingering love for the brother of her husband, who is the father to the three girls. This complicated by the fact that the two brothers have not spoken in years, because during the miners strike, Tony, father to the bride, and her two two sisters crossed a picket line, which Uncle Pete thought was unforgivable, and he said he stopped being his brother that day. This eventually evolves into a physical fight because the two of them, despite having not spoken in years, try to have some kind of a reconciliatory conversation at the wedding, it doesn't go well, but not nearly as badly as the situation with Marek. Now, Marek the groom, is played charmingly by Julian Kostov. He initially is this almost cartoonishly joyous personality who seems immune to all of the thinly veiled barbs that are being thrown at him, particularly by Hazel. Now, Hazel feels acutely xenophobic as a character motivated in this moment, possibly because her husband John, the one who secretly wants to run off with her sister, has recently lost his job, and because a Polish employee at the factory that she works at had been promoted over her. So she is linking the entire Polish population, who. Who it is told to her, have actually existed in the town for many decades longer than she is implying, to the notion of their family's personal financial hardship. And when Marek reveals that he actually needs a business partner and suddenly comes up with the idea to offer a job to John. She is almost insulted by this and says aloud to everyone at the table, oh, it's them giving us jobs now, is it? An incendiary statement which elicits a shocked response from the audience. But Marek does not write to this at the time. It does all clearly bubble inside him, though, and he subsequently has an argument with his brand new bride because he refuses to play the role of this forgiving and self sacrificing immigrant. And he not only stands up for himself, but he criticizes her for not having stood up on his behalf to her sister. And this all gets complicated massively by a brief encounter that he has with the elder of Hazel's two daughters, who in a moment of confused reassurance, kisses Marek, though when she later confesses, possesses it in order to protect her father's affair from being discovered, one that she had noticed earlier on when she saw him kissing her aunt Maggie, she portrays as having been the other way around, resulting in a sort of mob justice moment of physical violence against Marek that hospitalizes him on his wedding night. I told you this went to a chaotic place. But the most sizable revelation is yet to come when Sylvia storms into Hazel's house demanding that her daughter Leanne tell everyone that she had made the whole thing up, that it was a lie. Hazel is defending her daughter adamantly. Sylvia is still wearing their late mother's wedding dress that she had decided at the last minute to wear, only it's covered in her husband's blood as a result of him being hospitalized by her older sister's husband. And yet, even though she finally does confront Hazel about her attitudes towards Marek, her new husband, that isn't the thing that pulls the family apart. It is what this is all leading to. Because there's no way for Liane to explain why she said what she said without her father revealing that she was doing it to protect him. And the revelation that he had been having this emotional affair, at the very least, with Maggie. And this is the revelation that seems poised to ostracize the sisters from each other permanently. The three of them will possibly never come back together after this. But Beth Steele makes such an interesting choice. I mean, it's interesting enough to create a situation in which, you know this act of extraordinary violence isn't as bad as the affair that didn't quite happen. The notion that your husband hospitalizing your sister's husband is, is preferable to your sister kissing your husband once and trying to stop the whole thing from happening and moving very Far away, in order to avoid the situation. The notion that that thing is worse is hilarious in and of itself. But Beth Steele chooses to end in a moment that cherishes and prioritizes sisterhood between these women, even as they acknowledge that they're never going to be together, together as a trio again. Because the curtain falls proverbially in this moment of emotional hysteria, with the three of them just wanting to cherish that last moment spent together before the reckoning of tomorrow morning, before the inevitability of what is going to have to happen next. And it refuses us the juicy aftermath, instead demonstrating that, you know, their relationship is the most important factor here, in spite of the fact that it's already been destroyed. And destroyed largely by the actions of the men in their lives. Maggie, after all, was doing her very best, other than, you know, telling her sister about any of this to make sure that the adultery didn't happen. Now, there are a couple more performances which I haven't yet highlighted. But I also want to talk about one of the major themes of the piece, which is the grief of it all. And I'm so interested in how you depict the navigation of grief amongst a British family who culturally, are very emotionally repressed. That is, to generalize our British sense sensibility. And that is certainly the sensibility of the family within this play. And how they have each responded to grief and the roles that they have taken on and how that has perhaps changed Hazel and how she has become a more dominant force as the eldest sister. How it's left Maggie feeling a little wayward and without a source of advice and strength. How Sylvia has taken care of her father and become perhaps a little bit more passive, but also particularly in the behavior of their very stoic father, who is a fascinating character, one of my favorite characters on this stage and brilliantly performed. This is Tony, played by Alan Williams. At the start, it seems like he might be a little cantankerous, a little Big Daddy from Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, but there is such a sentimentality in the words that he is saying critically, not in his delivery, because he is stoic, because he does have this hard and exterior that seems unemotional. But he gives a beautiful speech after his daughter's wedding. And he offers his daughters and his granddaughters in turn this really startlingly insightful life advice that is hugely sentimental. And there's a particular moment in which he is fixing the bow of his granddaughter and acknowledges that he's had three daughters and he knows how to do it. And he just sort of cherishes.
- [26:42]
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- [27:38]
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- [28:10]
Mickey Jo
The Final moment and takes his time over it because his youngest daughter is getting married and leaving the house and that part of his life is ending as he's still dealing with the death of his wife. And we then later have this glorious scene where Aunt Carol is sort of shamelessly flirting with him and the two of them are amazing, remembering their youth and old days at the club and he won a Tarzan competition by carrying her over his shoulder and doing a Tarzan yell. And he has this wonderful moment in which he's transformed again into a younger version of himself, and though he's been sort of grumpily shuffling around the stage up to this point, he's suddenly moving like a much younger man. He is very spirited and he ends up lying on the floor giggling with Aunt Carol, his sister sister in law, leaving his brother Pete, who walks in on the two of them slightly less than pleased and instigating the long overdue conversation between the two emotionally estranged brothers. Now, Pete is played by Philip Whitchurch, and he has one of the most striking moments in the play, because a conversation about the closure of the mines prompts him to sort of eulogize all of them that once were and no longer are. And he responded, cites this list of all of the different towns and communities where there were mines that had been closed. This is clearly a huge part of him and his identity, and it's incredibly profound, the way that he reads through all of these. And it's a very clear demonstration of the lingering impact of this huge change in Britain in the 1980s. Now, I've not yet offered enough praise to Sinead Matthews, who plays Sylvia, the youngest of the three sisters, the one who is getting married. And we get to examine all of her anxieties and uncertainties. At the beginning of the play, she is just certain that something is going to go wrong. And when she doesn't fit into her wedding dress, she is relieved that that's the thing that's gone wrong and now everything else is going to be fine, how wrong she was. But by the end of the thing, when she storms back into her sister's house in her mother's wedding dress, covered in her husband's blood, demanding that their teenage daughter is retrieved and forced to apologize for the lie that she told that caused all of this literal bloodshed, she is transformed. And the creature that she becomes is extraordinary. She exhibits such power in this moment. But the most powerful person on stage is Lucy Black as Hazel, who, in response to her husband's admission that he no longer feels any kind of joy or passion in their relationship. He gives him this thorough dressing down where she passionately and angrily explains to him the nature of what his life would be like if he were to carry on down this road, about his financial prospects, about the kind of man that he would become if he were to make this choice. And she is furious in this moment. And it's. It's a really extraordinary speech. And all of this drama and all of this angst wouldn't necessarily be palatable if it wasn't for a little bit of comic relief. And there is a lot of comedy throughout this play. It is, like I said, very recognizable of British weddings, of British culture. And that means a lot of drama, a lot of family tension, but a lot of laughs as well, and never more so than when Dorothy Atkinson is on stage as Aunt Carol. Like I said, we've all met one, we all know one and she, in her evolving physicality, as she has more and more to drink at this wedding, becomes the most hysterical presence with just a little bit of a sinister edge as well, because we notice her noticing things and she becomes the person who we expect is going to drop the bomb about Maggie and John, even though ultimately it ends up coming from elsewhere. But she is nonetheless a brilliant theatrical catalyst in this piece and it's just a riotous performance. She's fantastic, as is every member of this company. There are some brilliant young performers in the cast as well. I particularly want to shout out the stage management. It's like Formula One pit stops that they're doing, reconfigured, configuring the set in between these scene changes, as they're laying the table, as they're bringing things out, as they're clearing the table. We have rainfall on stage at one point. It's a really stunning, visceral piece of theatre. But my greatest praise is just how familiar it feels and like I said before, the cultural accessibility of the whole thing. There are people in your life who may not enjoy the theater, who I think you could take to go and see Till the Stars Come Down. If they like a Coronation street, if they like a Emmerdale, there's gonna be enough for them to recognise and enjoy in this that you may just turn them into a theatre goer. And of course, if you are someone who already enjoys going to the theatre, you have to check this one out for yourself. One of the best plays that you could see this summer in London, Till the Stars Come down at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I loved it and I can't wait to hear what you all thought. If you've already seen this play, let us all know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed listening to my thoughts. Make sure to subscribe right here on YouTube for more reviews and other theatre themed videos coming very soon. Or you can go follow me on podcast platforms. Thank you for listening. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh, my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
- [33:29]
Sasha
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