Chris Pomfrett’s Tony, left, Victoria Delaney’s Maggie, Clare Halliday’s Hazel, Darren Barrott’s Marek, Joy Warner’s Sylvia, Laura Haynes-Bury’s Leanne, Daniel Wilmot’s Uncle Pete and Neil Vincent’s John in York Actors Collective’s Till The Stars Come. Picture: John Saunders
FOUNDER and director Angie Millard has an eye and an ear for picking a play for York Actors Collective.
Already in place for October 28 to 31 at York Theatre Royal Studio is Stephanie Jacob’s three-hander The Strongbox, winner of the 2018 VAULT Origins Award for outstanding new work for its story of domestic servitude and abuse of power, wherein authoritarian Kat, her ageing mother, Ma, and their teenaged slave, Maudie, jostle for power and affection in their dilapidated London home.
This week, Millard is staging the York premiere of another contemporary British domestic drama, Beth Steel’s Olivier Award-nominated Till The Stars Come Down, premiered at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre as recently as January 2024.
She did not see that production, choosing it because she “liked the sound of the play”, and subsequently being impressed by its frank, earthy comedy, its pathos and home-and-away truths – and by its central structure of three sisters, matching her own upbringing in South Yorkshire.
Steel had set her play in a former mining village in Nottinghamshire, where the scars of the “scabs” who broke the picket lines when Margaret Thatcher took on the National Union of Mineworkers are still tender to the touch.
Those scars are no less raw in Yorkshire’s former mining communities, and so Millard, whose education began in a Catholic school in a pit village, has re-located Steel’s family conflagration further north. Ostensibly South Yorkshire, although some accents in her cast head farther north still to the Tyne & Wear.
Till The Stars Come Down is set on a single day, charting the pre-match, the match and the post-match discussions of Sylvia’s nuptials with Polish immigrant Marek, who now runs his own business.
Weddings make for heightened drama, for love’s blossom and blisters, for too much drinking, too much talking, leading to confessions, fall-outs, “inappropriate” behaviour, the exposure of prejudices and the re-opening of old wounds.
It could be the posh world of London society and country houses in Four Weddings And A Funeral or, in Steel’s case, the turbulence of a working-class family where “long-held secrets, passions, tensions and social changes transform the celebration into a chaotic blend of humour and tragedy”.
It opens with the three sisters, Clare Halliday’s bigoted Hazel, Victoria Delaney’s oft-married loose cannon Maggie (in riotous red) and Joy Warner’s phlegmatic Sylvia preparing for the big day – the routine of make-up, hairspray, dresses and endless cups of tea – alongside Lucinda Rennison’s ever-indiscreet, aspirational Aunty Carol and Laura Haynes-Bury’s Leanne, Hazel’s 16-year-old daughter, whose gaze is solely for scrolling her mobile phone.
The men will make their entries: the sisters’ father Tony (Chris Pomfrett), still grieving for his late wife; his brother Uncle Pete (Daniel Wilmot), Carol’s partner, who has never forgiven him for crossing the picket line, and Neil Vincent’s John, who has lost interest in wife Carol on account of his obsession with the woman in scarlet, Delaney’s Maggie.
The only man who is happy rather than dischuffed with his lot in life is Darren Barrott’s (CORRECT) Marek, but a can of worms marked “zenophobia” will be opened as the wedding day progresses.
Steel writes with observational wit, social commentary and, above all, a telepathic understanding of the relationship of sisters. Warner’s Sylvia is the solid, reliable one who has looked after mother and father alike; Delaney’s Maggie and Halliday’s Hazel are the ones at war, and together they deliver a brilliantly kinetic finale, reaffirming their status as two of the supreme actresses on the York circuit.
Delaney’s performance is all the more remarkable for her taking on the role at less than three weeks’ notice. Haynes-Bury impresses with her deadpan demeanour and Rennison rises to the challenge of drunken acting with aplomb.
Barrott, in his YSP debut after catching the eye with York Settlement Community Players, is outstanding as “outsider” Marek; Pomfrett’s Tony wears that hangdog expression he has made his trademark; Vincent’s John plays the villain’s hand well and Wilmot’s Uncle Pete is all bonhomie on the surface until the gripes of the past boil over anew.
Millard directs with admirably flowing movement and quick scene changes, while ensuring her cast lets the full flavour of Steel’s clashing, dysfunctional family flood out, bringing out the rising stress to the max and emphasising the power of the sisterhood too.
York Actors Collective presents Till The Stars Come Down, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2pm and 6pm, Saturday. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
