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.
Directed by Robert Hastie, it looks at first like it is relishing a little too much in its theatricality as the three sets of characters swirl around the set together, in their own parallel worlds. There is little story in-between songs initially and Chris Bush’s book comes with stock characters. A slightly too generic steel-working family brought low by Thatcher’s breaking of the unions, Liberian refugees bemoaning Britain’s unseasoned food and a posh southerner Poppy (Alex Young) who moves in after the estate has been hollowed of its working-class residents to talk pointedly of Ottolenghi and Ocado.
But it blooms into a glorious love letter indeed, revealing a big, booming heart and astonishing sound. Hawley’s music and lyrics stand front and centre of the production, characters often making first entrances through song and occasionally breaking out of a scene to perform a number, microphone in hand, as if at a gig.
The cast is uniformly strong and their singing outstanding. Faith Omole’s voice has the deep, rich timbre of Amy Winehouse’s while Maimuna Memon’s songs blast with emotion. Ensemble numbers bring shivers. Feet tap, spines tingle. We find ourselves swaying in our seats. Together with its lovely movement, the show becomes unstoppably winning, ineffably exuberant.
Originally staged in Sheffield, it is a perfect fit for the Olivier stage. A band (sensational) sits on a mezzanine platform which in Ben Stones’ gorgeous set is the outside of the estate, with the inside space below. The graffitied words “I love you will you marry me”, a city landmark, hang above, like one of Tracey Emin’s romantic neon signs.
There is unabashed sentimentality in the intersecting storylines. Characters stay thinly drawn but we start to care what happens to them until we are rapt, weeping, with bated breath. Joy (Omole) and Jimmy’s (Samuel Jordan) romance reaches for the heart and squeezes it. Poppy’s broken relationship with Nikki (Memon) brings strong drama, and there are excellent smiling rows with Poppy and her toffee-nosed mother.
It has an upbeat spirit to the last but does not take the full turn into the happy ending we are expecting, while the sentimentality is leavened by Bush’s witty book. As one character says self-consciously while making a grand romantic gesture, this is “Richard Curtis bullshit”. It might be, but it is extremely moving all the same. Just one word of advice for the willing: take tissues.
• Standing at the Sky’s Edge is at the National Theatre until 25 March.
