Standing at the Sky’s Edge review – Richard Hawley pulls on the heartstrings in his Sheffield opus

Ensemble numbers bring shivers … Standing at the Sky’s Edge. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

This musical “love letter to Sheffield” springs from the idea that the walls of a building retain imprints of its inhabitants, past and present.

The building here is the city’s Park Hill housing estate, its interior and exterior ingeniously created on stage, and its inhabitants zigzag past each other across 60 years. Dramatised to the beat of Richard Hawley’s music, we see how the nation’s political gyrations leave their marks on the lives of three families and the city, from 1960 to Thatcherism, Brexit and beyond. The estate chugs inexorably towards gentrification until it becomes the Grade II* listed trophy building of today.