A wedding day is fertile ground for a family drama but is also riddled with the risk of cliches: drunken flirting, face-offs between estranged siblings, awkward aunts and, of course, an 11th-hour dress crisis.
Beth Steel’s play has them all, so how is it that it seems spun in gold, the earthy humour tingling with originality, the canvas both big and small and the larger-than-life characters dazzlingly performed and bouncing to life before us in pain, joy, and laughter?
Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews), one of a trio of sisters, is getting married to Polish Marek (Marc Wootton), who is welcomed into the family fold reluctantly. In Mansfield, a former pit town which has a newly arrived eastern European population, those tensions run organically alongside the human drama. Steel’s previous plays were also set in the same deindustrialised East Midlands landscape, but more often explored the politics around its former coalminers and their families. This play brings the women blazingly to the fore.
They are all forces of nature, from Sylvia’s sisters, Maggie (Lisa McGrillis) and Hazel (Lucy Black), to their fantastically gobby aunt Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne). They are broadly drawn, but distinct enough to become real and endearing. You feel part of the wedding, investing in the characters and their emotional lives.
The fathers, uncles and love interests are all off stage at first, while these women get ready for the big day. They drink Buck’s Fizz, bitch about next door’s hot-tub (“sex pond”), and talk in vivid demotic (“I don’t know my arsehole from my fanny this morning,” says Carol). This opening scene alone is a masterclass in multi-layered conversational naturalism.
The sisters’ mother is dead and their father, Tony (Alan Williams), is embroiled in a rift of many decades with his brother, Pete (Philip Whitchurch). There are bursts of music, drunken disorder, betrayal, intrigues and shocks alongside the dull pain of everyday marital compromise.
Deftly directed by Bijan Sheibani, the production has a busy naturalism with sudden pauses and sparks of interiority, and is staged beautifully within a players’ chalked circle, of sorts. A disco ball overhead, on Samal Blak’s simple yet exquisite set design, foreshadows the drunken evening do ahead but also brings a lovely, lyrical headiness.
The migration debate is incorporated into the histories of the men, once miners, now unemployed or forced to work away on submarines, or stack shelves in the warehouse that has replaced the town’s pit. The issues are never preached but are delivered through drama. One grandchild does not even know of Mansfield’s mining history, while uncle Pete stands up at the wedding dinner to name each of the closed pits, one by one, in what sounds like a liturgical chant, powerfully demonstrating how some of these characters are still living in the past.
The only element that feels slightly askew is Marek, from Wootton’s accent to the character’s lack of distinction. But then again, he has entered an overpowering family. It is they who are the central players as the wedding party whirls into melodrama of a high order – rollicking, complex and bearing the tragic inevitability of Greek drama.
At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 16 March
