Standing at the Sky’s Edge – National Theatre

Alex Young in Standing at the Sky’s Edge at the Olivier, National Theatre. Picture: Johan Persson 

Standing at the Sky’s Edge continues at the National Theatre (Olivier) until 25 March 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

A show whose central character is a 1960s high-rise housing estate in Sheffield – “a man-made monolith” – sounds unlikely but Robert Hastie’s direction, imaginative theatre craft and plenty of heart make it both dramatically arresting and moving.

We’re inside a flat in Park Hill, Sheffield. The views, we’re repeatedly reminded, are fabulous. Ben Stones’ grandiloquent set gives us brutalist balconies and concrete pillars around which the choreography (Lynne Page) is woven.

Someone, in real life, scrawled “I love you will you marry me” on the building in 2001. Later cleaned off but reinstated last year, these seven words are neon-lit above the set.

And in this setting writer Chris Bush gives us a compelling narrative. We see the original occupants – an excited couple hoping to start a family. The second family, in the 1980s, are a Liberian refugee brother and sister looking after a teenager whose parents disappeared in their native country. Later she takes over the flat and lives in it with her partner and their daughter. Thirdly, after the flats are “yuppified” and sold off privately, comes a young Londoner on the rebound after a failed same sex relationship.

Sometimes we see all three families in the same space getting on with their lives but not, obviously, seeing each other. It’s a good story too, because it eventually transpires that these families are linked in other ways.

At the heart of all this is the music – Richard Hawley’s songs which range from tender lyricism to raucous electric guitar-dominated numbers. In the finale to Act I when everything falls apart in every sense the music gets ever louder and tensions, panic and anger build up.

An eight-piece band, led by John Rutledge on keys, sits in full view at the back of the on-stage balcony and finds a great deal of colour and emotion in this music. I loved the unsettling string glissandi in ‘My Little Treasures’, for example.

Apart from an appalling first few bars which were woefully out of tune and which I will kindly attribute to first night nerves, the singing is strong from a cast of 21.

Faith Omole is an outstanding singer with some magnificent low contralto notes, Alex Young gives us several show-stopping moments as Poppy and Robert Lonsdale delights as Harry.

Of course this is a political piece whose narrative takes us right through the strikes of the 1970s, the demise of the steelworks in Sheffield and the sell-off of council housing stock – among other things.

The effects on the ordinary folk at the heart of this story are profound but people are people irrespective of background and personally I found the repeated sneering jokes about, for example, Ocado customers a bit wearing. But most of the press night audience was firmly with the show’s sentiments – a striker’s (ever topical) rhetorical diatribe about underdogs got a spontaneous round of applause.

Susan Elkin