Five stars for Standing at the Sky’s Edge, an exhilarating, big-hearted musical — review

Standing at the Sky’s Edge

National Theatre (Olivier), London

“Can you imagine watching the sunrise from up here?” sighs newly-wed Rose as she surveys the view from her spanking new concrete block of flats. “I’d sooner have a lie-in,” replies her husband, Harry. And with that Chris Bush’s Standing at the Sky’s Edge announces itself and the mixture of sweet and tart, tender and tough, that will drive this exhilarating, big-hearted musical. First performed at the Sheffield Crucible, it now moves into the National’s Olivier theatre, filling that huge space with story and song, drawn largely from Richard Hawley’s 2012 album of the same name.

It’s also a prime example of illuminating the universal through the specific. The specific is Park Hill, a vast complex of high-rise social housing opened in Sheffield in 1961. Bush traces the experience of three (fictitious) generations occupying one apartment, the stories beginning in 1960, 1989 and 2015 and told simultaneously. The universal is both personal — love, hope, loss — and political as Sheffield falls from 1960s optimism into post-industrial decline.

The estate becomes a microcosm of recent British history. We meet first Harry (Robert Lonsdale) and Rose (Rachael Wooding), a working-class couple whose lives will be upended by the closing of the steelworks, then Joy (Faith Omole), who has fled civil war in Liberia, and finally Poppy (Alex Young), a middle-class Londoner trying to make a new start in the now redeveloped estate. Common to all of them is a longing to feel at home.

The structure has drawbacks — the stories are inevitably clipped and simplified — and sometimes Bush states political points that are already clear from the narrative. But her script is sparkily witty and affectionate, she interweaves the stories with great skill so that we see patterns repeat and consequences unfold, and she and the cast bring the characters to vibrant life.

It’s impossible not to care for these individuals as they navigate love, grapple with the impact of huge sociopolitical issues, scrabble to stay afloat. Hawley’s rich, versatile music amplifies their feelings, sometimes raucous with rage, sometimes delicate with hope, sometimes dizzy with love.

Robert Hastie’s superb production, on Ben Stones’s soaring set, orchestrates all this beautifully, overlapping the stories to revealing or playful effect. His staging is peppered with standout performances, particularly from Omole, Young and Wooding. But this is also emphatically an ensemble piece. Bush and Hawley celebrate individual ordinary lives; they also reflect the importance of community, of home, of dignity, of belonging. As characters pour their hearts out, the rest of the company, using Lynne Page’s sympathetic choreography, echo their feelings. A wonderfully generous, uplifting piece of theatre.

★★★★★

To March 25, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Phaedra

National Theatre (Lyttelton), London

In the Lyttelton theatre, we have intergenerational drama of a different order. And even before the sparks start to fly, there are hints of what’s to come. Awaiting the arrival of a guest — a long-lost figure from her past — Helen (Janet McTeer) slips out of her crisp white working shirt and into a silky gold blouse. It gleams, seductively. Around her, her family joke and bicker in their achingly chic kitchen. But the jokes are about adultery and about teenage son Declan’s paternity: there’s an edge to the banter.

It wouldn’t take much, we suspect, to shatter this brittle set-up. So when Sofiane arrives, a quiet, contained individual clutching a bottle of wine, you can practically taste the discomfort in the air. McTeer’s Helen, hitherto the picture of supreme confidence, stands motionless in her silken blouse, staring at him in open astonishment.

This is Phaedra in a blistering new version of Seneca’s tragedy by writer and director Simon Stone. Here the Cretan princess of myth becomes Helen, a successful sixtysomething politician married to Hugo, an Iranian diplomat. Sofiane, with whom Helen falls wildly in love, is not her stepson, but the son of her Moroccan lover from decades earlier. His arrival — and his resemblance to his father — poleaxes her, plunging her back into her youth.

As Helen lurches into a giddy affair with Sofiane, her daughter Isolde likewise pins her frustrations on to him. He, in turn, has his own ghosts to exorcise. Complications multiply, creating a messy tangle of desire, grief, guilt and memory. Everyone projects their unresolved longings on to another.

In Stone’s hands, ancient myth also becomes a scathing critique of western middle-class privilege and self-absorption: Helen’s rosy memories are of freedom and an exotic fling, careless of the real political and personal context for her Moroccan lover. She treats her black colleague (Akiya Henry) as a sounding board and serves food from Deliveroo to her guest. And as with Stone’s searing adaptation of Yerma, this all unfolds in a glass cube (designed by Chloe Lamford).

Here, as that cube revolves, it feels increasingly like a hothouse. This world of surfaces splinters as raw, animal emotions surge to the fore. Stone and his excellent cast splice tragedy with pitch-black comedy, nowhere more so than in an excruciating showdown in a stylish restaurant, where the family tear lumps out of each other, to the mortification of other diners and the staff.

It’s led from the front by McTeer’s sensational Helen, who drags us with her through the delirium of desire and the viciousness of jealousy to a desolate ending. Around her everyone else is scorched in the blaze: her mild husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi, quite brilliant), her well-meaning son-in-law (John Macmillan), her alienated daughter (Mackenzie Davis) and son (Archie Barnes), and Assaad Bouab’s elusive, conflicted Sofiane, on whom she exacts a terrible revenge.

What is missing, however, is a sense of struggle within Helen that could make her more of a nuanced and tragic figure. Her ending feels abrupt, and the overloaded final scene has too much work to do to be moving and veers close to melodrama. But this is still a riveting piece, blazingly acted.

★★★★☆

To April 8, nationaltheatre.org.uk

The Lehman Trilogy

Gillian Lynne Theatre, London

To another rotating glass box and another tale of hope and hubris — but in a very different tone. Sam Mendes’s magnificent 2018 staging of The Lehman Trilogy returns to London’s West End with a terrific new cast as the three Jewish brothers from Bavaria, whose tiny 19th-century fabric shop evolves into a vast business that came crashing down in 2008.

The key to the show’s success is its simplicity: three actors, one pianist and one set combining to tell an epic story in the most intimate, human way. The resourcefulness and ingenuity of the brothers is matched onstage: confined to the glass office (designed by Es Devlin) in which the company ultimately collapses, the three actors play dozens of characters and use whatever is to hand as props.

Nigel Lindsay (Henry), Michael Balogun (Emanuel) and Hadley Fraser (Mayer) make the roles their own and build a lovely, mischievous relationship with the audience. Nick Powell’s spare, evocative piano score, played by Yshani Perinpanayagam, is a constant companion. It’s the story of modern America and modern capitalism, told with wit, with compassion and, ironically, with admirable economy.

★★★★☆

To May 20, nationaltheatre.org.uk