Who’d have guessed a musical about Sheffield’s brutalist Park Hill housing estate could be so uplifting? Playwright Chris Bush has worked the stirring earworms of her fellow native, the much-feted singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, into a beguiling triple narrative covering the development’s utopian postwar conception, its demise in the Eighties and its 21st century yuppie rebirth.
As well as a moving human story, this is an interaction between modernist concrete buildings: Park Hill, the National, and the Crucible, where Sheffield Theatres’ artistic director Robert Hastie first mounted the show in 2019. Even after its journey down to London, it’s still defiantly wedded to Sheffield, with jokes about the city’s two football teams and the inhabitants’ hatred of Leeds. Although the detail is local, the message about community, pride and the double-edged sword of gentrification is universal.
