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 begins with “hello sugar tits”, with gossip about neighbours who have improved their garden with a “sex pond” (hot tub) and debates about whether you can wear a fascinator if you have a flat head. 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.
A huge mirror ball hangs over the stage, fracturing the light designed by the mighty Paule Constable. Sometimes this looks like a bauble, sometimes like a silver planet: the dual aspects suggest the span of Steel’s writing in her best play yet. 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. Divisions going back to the miners’ strike, adultery, lost hope, bigotry. There is mayhem (“It’s not the first time we’ve had a meal out. We know how to kick off”), violence, fierce love and sharp sorrow.
There are small blotches – the Polish groom is underwritten – but Sheibani’s production brims with vivacity. How wonderfully the stage heaps up with stuff – from hairdryers to cheese hedgehogs – and is gradually drained. How spot-on are Samal Blak’s costumes: the tight scarlet satin frock, the wedding dress that gapes. How marvellously a first-rate cast pull together as their characters pull apart. And just look at Lorraine Ashbourne and Lisa McGrillis suddenly recognising in each other, though decades apart, the same lost loves and lives. Those of a struggling post-industrial Britain.
Ola Ince’s production of Othello deals in wraparound threat. It’s a play that often performs fitfully: the most resonant lines uttered by the hero – more sinned against than sinning – seeming to float on the action rather than fuel it. Ince throws around the tragedy a noose of contemporary resonance: this tightens things up but also distracts.
In Black-lives-don’t-matter London, Othello is a top cop in the Met. Amelia Jane Hankin’s design is iron-clad and dark; the air crackles with racism on walkie-talkies. There are nifty verbal adjustments, with references to Scotland Yard and Docklands, and clumping changes: does Desdemona have to be Dezzie?
Ince’s relocation makes horrible sense, giving steely conviction to Othello’s joshing, violent subordinates. Ralph Davis is a convincing Iago, an instinctive resenter as much as a plotter: he wants to bring down Cassio (a fine, frank Oli Higginson) partly because he is “an Eton boy”, perhaps a reference to the Etonian Tom Hiddleston’s memorable Cassio? Sam Swann – once clothed as a Deliveroo driver – makes Roderigo a truly funny clown. The least rewarding part of Othello is split between Ken Nwosu – straightforward, calm – and Ira Mandela Siobhan who, as “Subconscious Othello”, writhes beside Nwosu, shuddering, sometimes echoing, sometimes restraining him. This strikingly dramatises Othello’s opacity but slightly detracts from the role’s possibilities, suggesting an actor can convey only one thing at a time. The heart is in the candour of Poppy Gilbert’s impressive Desdemona and in Charlotte Bate’s forthright Emilia, one of my favourite Shakespearean characters, whose tragedy is realising her strong mind has been duped.
Unusually seated to one side, I was given a salutary reminder: most paying spectators do not have such a favourable view as critics. Important moments were obscured; craning to see, I became as acrobatic as Othello’s second self.
Plaza Suite. First there’s a black wig, a pair of weird brown stockings (with a seam in 1968?) and a staid tweed suit. They meet a pair of braces and have a marital spat. Then there’s a too-young minidress with a bow, which encounters an excruciating pair of check trousers. They have a kiss and a dance. Finally there is a sticking-out floral dress and a giant hat that looks as if it is giving birth to several baby hats; they are on sparring terms with a baggy pair of grey trousers and a frock coat.
Is there anyone inside the fabric so energetically designed by Jane Greenwood? Hard to tell. Though rapturously applauded as soon as they arrive on stage, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who play three different couples meeting in the same suite at the Plaza hotel, are doing coathanger acting, encased in a set by John Lee Beatty that is both doggedly realistic and flimsy (flat-looking skyscrapers at the windows). There is, it’s true, some agile comic legwork. Broderick slithers around on his as if the carpet were ice, and scissors them wide open in an awkward #MeToo scene so that Parker gets a ringside view of his film director’s crotch. Parker points up the “jokes” in Neil Simon’s archaic comedy with tilting head and arched brows.
The pair are in a hopeless case dramatically. Yet paradoxically, John Benjamin Hickey’s sluggish Broadway production is an ad for the theatre. The sheer thrill of seeing the screen couple in the flesh has sent prices soaring. What might have happened with a crisply directed, sharply written play?
Star ratings (out of five)
Till the Stars Come Down ★★★★
Othello ★★★
Plaza Suite ★
