Till the Stars Come Down Reviews Round-up ★★★★

"A brilliantly observed slice of modern working-class life"

"Beth Steel's excellent family drama at the National feels like a breath of fresh air amidst the current dearth of entertaining new writing"

"With Till The Stars Come Down, we get that rare thing, a family drama about the white working-class today, with ramifications for us all, taking in the impact of immigration, financial insecurity and uncertainty, plus love, death and the whole complex kaboodle of getting through life. It’s often deliriously funny, but also has a stabbing sense of insoluble pain."

"If there’s a soap-ishness about some of the wrangling and raised stakes, Steel convinces you of the epic emotions contained in small-town lives."

"Overall, it’s an ensemble triumph but mention must be made of Sinead Matthews as Sylvia, brimming with fragile hope and a numinous yearning to hold time at bay, Marc Wootton as her bearish, possibly overbearing Polish partner, Lorraine Ashbourne as the incorrigible Aunty Carol and Alan Williams as the stony-faced Tony."

"Your invitation to the wedding of the year"

"Beth Steel’s new drama is dazzlingly performed and full of pain, joy and laughter in a deft production by Bijan Sheibani"

"A wedding day is fertile ground for a family drama but is also riddled with the risk of cliches: drunken flirting, face-offs between estranged siblings, awkward aunts and, of course, an 11th-hour dress crisis. Beth Steel’s play has them all, so how is it that it seems spun in gold, the earthy humour tingling with originality, the canvas both big and small and the larger-than-life characters dazzlingly performed and bouncing to life before us in pain, joy, and laughter?"

"This play brings the women blazingly to the fore. They are all forces of nature, from Sylvia’s sisters, Maggie (Lisa McGrillis) and Hazel (Lucy Black), to their fantastically gobby aunt Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne). They are broadly drawn, but distinct enough to become real and endearing. You feel part of the wedding, investing in the characters and their emotional lives."

"Deftly directed by Bijan Sheibani, the production has a busy naturalism with sudden pauses and sparks of interiority, and is staged beautifully within a players’ chalked circle, of sorts."

"Beth Steel’s battling Notts wedding guests are a treat"

"Beth Steel’s new play Till the Stars Come Down – zingingly directed by Bijan Sheibani – lands at the National with the biggest burst of backchat and joy that I have seen for months."

"It ends in rawness and desolation, yet also with energy: the three women left standing – just – evoke Chekhov’s Three Sisters, but they belong to today and they come from Nottinghamshire."

"Till the Stars Come Down takes place at a wedding. You might expect trouble. Yet the varieties and depth of difficulty are unforseeable. They steal up like smoke between the gaps in the gags, and slowly engulf the action."

"There are small blotches – the Polish groom is underwritten – but Sheibani’s production brims with vivacity."

"A wedding goes awry in a crowd-pleasing comedy with series finale energy"

"Beth Steel’s play about a multigenerational family has a cheeky spirit but a tragic undercurrent, as its characters grapple with the simmering tensions of life in a post-Brexit community"

"A pair of elasticated Spanx pings into a near-hysterical audience in the first act of Beth Steel’s zingy comedy, set at a small town Northern wedding where all decorum breaks down. It’s typical of the cheeky spirit of this crowd-pleasing play – but peel off the layers and there’s tragedy underneath."

"This play niggles at the tensions in a post-Brexit community where there’s not much to go round, but pride and apathy end up being almost as corrosive as decades of underfunding."

"Bijan Sheibani’s pacy, stylish production ramps up this story’s epic side by turning the stage into a mini solar system."

"... Steel’s play still feels like an achievement, deftly handling a huge line-up of Northern working-class characters and making them shine with a sharp, flawed brightness."

"Beth Steel’s drama about three sisters trapped in their working-class East Midlands community is funny and poignant"

"‘Till the Stars Come Down’ is a beautifully observed and often bruisingly hilarious play that centres on Hazel, Maggie and Sylvia, a trio of sisters from Mansfield, who have reunited for the wedding of Sinead Matthews’s Sylvia."

"‘Till the Stars Come Down’ is a rich, multifaceted character study, not of an individual but an entire family. At its heart is the question of what it does to the soul to live your whole life in your hometown, on a path entirely predefined for you."

"It’s wonderfully written and acted, building to a dynamite final scene... Sheibani directs warmly and fluidly, with Samal Blak’s simple but effective floor-level astroturf set bringing the cast up close and personal, casting us as the remaining guests at the wedding."

"It‘s beautiful and painful but I do now need to talk about the Polish stuff. Unfortunately, Sylvia’s husband Marek feels like grist to the wider plot, a sympathetic figure there to complicate the English characters. But I’m sorry to say the character is so tossed off that it’s hard to see what the play really gains from his presence."

"Finally, an authentic working-class drama"

"Beth Steel’s debut for the National, set at a wedding in Mansfield, plunges us into the middle of a clan whose passions, jokes and prejudices are utterly authentic."

"Along the way you get the most sharply observed ensemble performances you are likely to see all year. The director Bijan Sheibani, who gave us the teeming African diaspora panorama Barber Shop Chronicles, presents the action in the round, drawing the audience into the banter as if they are guests at the reception."

"Salty humour keeps it all in balance. Lorraine Ashbourne is a magnificently raunchy Aunty Carol, a sort of oversexed Vera Duckworth. As the alcohol flows, the indiscretions grow more serious. McGrillis wins more and more of our sympathy as she begins to realise that everyone’s lives could be about to unravel."

"Stellar cast shines in uproarious family drama"

"This is the latest National Theatre show to feature a stunning ensemble of actors"

"In Beth Steel’s uproariously enthralling new play, a wedding unlocks family tensions and wider historic and social schisms in a former Nottinghamshire mining community. Bijan Sheibani’s full-throated production is the latest at the National to feature an absolutely stunning ensemble."

"It’s no accident that the play centres on three sisters; Steel creates a Chekhovian blend of comedy and tragedy, amped up by booze and ribald East Midlands bluntness."

"She gives every character a fair and sympathetic hearing, including Hazel’s troubled, attention-seeking daughters and the monumentally self-absorbed, casually racist Carol. She makes you laugh again and again before delivering a gut punch of emotion. Steel by name…"

"... it’s still an early contender for the best play of the year."

"Compassionate, hilarious and tangy with fear and longing"

"Beth Steel’s new wedding-day drama set in a former mining community is a gloriously messy affair"

"Returning to the working-class Nottinghamshire of her own upbringing, Steel – one of British theatre’s most sensitive and intelligent chroniclers of family life and its intersection with the sociopolitical – presents a vivid multigenerational portrait of people tied together, and to their home, by blood and history."

"There is an obvious nod to Chekhov in the vodka-fuelled family dynamics, but Steel’s play is much more fun and, structurally and tonally, as unruly as a dance-floor ding-dong. The texture of her writing – her salty wit and her sure, tender touch with the subtleties of intimate interaction, especially between women – unfailingly absorbs and compels. And Bijan Sheibani’s production, performed with terrific verve by a crack cast, sears and scintillates."

"2024’s best drama yet"

"The National has a hit on its hands with this zinging family story"

"What a pleasure it is to report that the first big new drama to open in 2024 (or the first after the disappointing Catherine Tate vehicle The Enfield Haunting) is a considerable success. The National has a tasty hit on its hands, with a zinging new work that deftly intertwines comedy with hard-hitting truths."

"Bijan Sheibani’s lively, loving, in-the-round production revels in the earthy humour of Steel’s script, which instantly convinces in its depiction of family dynamics."

"The first scene, which instantly embeds us in this place with these people, is one of the most successful starts to a new play that I can remember."