Till the Stars Come Down, Nottingham Playhouse Review

Sep 11

4 min read

★★★★☆

Till the Stars Come Down at Nottingham Playhouse is a filthy, funny, fiercely local family drama that knows exactly how to make a Mansfield wedding feel enormous. Caroline Steinbeis’ production finds terrific theatricality in its escalating chaos. The play’s big question is simply: when does a family party stop being funny and start becoming something much darker?

Woman in a white veil and dress stands with arms outstretched in rain on a dark stage, singing with a dramatic expression — AK Golding as Sylvia. Photo Credit: Sam Taylor.

Sylvia is getting married to Marek, and the Stone family have gathered in Mansfield to celebrate. Her sisters, aunties and relatives prepare for the wedding before the men join the party and Polish vodka starts flowing. As drinks loosen tongues, old resentments, infidelities, unemployment, racism and family secrets emerge, turning a wedding celebration into an increasingly brutal confrontation between people who know one another far too well.

Beth Steel’s writing is at its funniest when the characters simply behave like people from the East Midlands. “As tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm” sounds like one of my own mother’s Nottinghamshire idioms, while Carol’s refusal to “kick him out of bed for farting” has exactly the gloriously filthy ordinariness the production needs. The script is undoubtedly funny; however, occasionally the one-liners sound too polished and well-written for the people speaking them. You begin to hear Steel’s intelligent joke construction rather than the character delivering it.

The opening scene is genuinely hilarious: a Bucks Fizz-fuelled wedding preparation where every joke establishes another relationship, irritation or insecurity. By Act 2, the audience has been trained to expect a punchline after every comment. So when the laughter stops, and the drama takes over, the impact is immediate; after so much laughter, its absence becomes almost deafening.

Wedding reception on a dark stage, with bride and groom seated at a long decorated table while guests and a photographer watch

Emma Pallant’s Hazel is fascinating but initially over-pitched. Her irritability and shouty certainty establish the character’s grievances clearly, particularly her resentment towards Polish workers and her husband’s unemployment, but because the performance begins at such a high intensity, her later collapse into despair has less distance to travel. That said, the delivery of her quick-witted quips had me laughing out loud repeatedly.

Sadie Shimmin’s Aunty Carol is a terrific creation: brash, outrageous and recognisable; It was like my own Aunty Jean was on the stage. Shimmin’s It’s Raining Men lip-sync captures the production’s ability to put vulgar comedy beside genuine emotional damage. Yet Shimmin’s delivery occasionally became difficult to watch. At times, it felt as though she had forgotten her lines, creating awkward pauses that disrupted the rhythm of the dialogue; or it may have been an unusual delivery style. Either way, the effect was the same: the natural cadence of the scene stalled. The extended drunk-aunt business towards the end of Act 1 also outstays its welcome for me.

Leah Brotherhead gives Maggie a tightly controlled energy, holding herself together while the rest of the family descends into wedding chaos. Her initial refusal to drink suggests something is being kept from us, before the revelation that she is in love with her sister’s husband, John, gives that restraint a very different meaning. Brotherhead and Graeme Hawley make the affair feel painfully believable: Maggie becomes emotional and desperate for her sister’s forgiveness after kissing her husband, while Hawley’s John retreats into the background, seemingly confident that his wife will ultimately take his side. Their chemistry makes the betrayal land, but John’s daughter Leanne's discovery marks the point where the production begins to tip into melodrama. Ellie Daley brings plenty of stroppy teenage energy to the role, although her Act One closing monologue felt more aggressive than desolate.

Six performers dance on a dark stage under vivid pink and blue lights, arms raised in a lively, theatrical scene.

The production’s technical elements are executed effortlessly; Oli Townsend’s design progressively strips away the domestic clutter until the final confrontation takes place against an almost empty stage. The more secrets that come to light, the fewer places the family has to hide them. Johanna Town’s lighting and Oliver Vibrans’ sound and composition similarly understand theatre’s fundamentals and deploy them without fuss. Kate Godfrey’s dialect work deserves particular credit, giving the ensemble a convincing Nottingham drawl without turning regional speech into caricature.

I’m usually unconvinced by actors entering and exiting through the audience; too often it feels like a theatrical gimmick. Similarly, I’m rarely persuaded that the kind of camera cinematics Jamie Lloyd has made fashionable have much place in theatre. Here, however, both choices work. Steinbeis turns the auditorium into an extension of the wedding, making the audience feel like guests caught up in the family’s celebrations. The handheld camera at the wedding table feels particularly natural, like a relative filming the day, rather than a director trying to make theatre look like television. Neither device feels like decoration: both pull us further into the family’s world.

Joe Alessi’s Uncle Pete provides one of the production’s finest moments when he solemnly lists the closed Nottinghamshire pits over a singing wine glass. It turns industrial history into something approaching a memorial ritual, connecting the family’s present-day resentments to losses that have never entirely disappeared in Nottinghamshire.

Till the Stars Come Down is messy in precisely the way a family wedding should be, and this production understands how to turn that mess into increasingly painful theatre. Come for the wedding; stay for the family implosion.