Review: STANDING AT THE SKY'S EDGE, National Theatre

If Chris Bush wrote one play in three for Rock, Paper, Scissors, Standing at the Sky's Edge is three plays in one. A triptych of stories stratified across time, but all set in the same flat on the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, are chronologically sliced and interwoven to create a tender yet powerful collage of Sheffield's spiritual and political history.

The way Chris Bush conjures a sense of time and place is astonishing. She evokes the stories effortlessly in all their unspeakable totality, warmth, and sentimentality alongside the philosophies that underpin their lives and the building's own history of birth, decline, and regeneration.

A working-class couple in the early seventies echo the post-war optimism that birthed the estate and its utilitarian design only to see both their lives and that hope wither in the face of economic downturn and strikes. The flat becomes a refuge for a young African girl escaping violence in her home country in the late eighties who must then acclimatise to an new world that like her is uncertain of its own identity. After the estate's redevelopment in 2015, an affluent upper middle-class Londoner seeks to reinvent herself in Sheffield after a breakup. The estate's working class history is sublimated in the name of gentification.

Bush's acute understanding of the interplay of space and objects is nothing short of Proustian. It is not madeleines that are the culinary lynchpin tying memory and identity. It's Henderson's relish, a Sheffield delicacy. A gorgeously crafted dinner sequence entwines the three timelines with the bottle of sauce passed across the table in each setting, reverberating across time as a theatrical personification of the city.

Her writing and Richard Hawley's protean music are gorgeously balanced. They converse with each other like old friends in the pub with neither one dominating the other. A powerful ensemble work off each other to charge the music with heartfelt electricity.

Standing at the Sky's Edge received critical acclaim when it premiered in Sheffield. What will become of it outside its home turf in London? The cultural weight of Park Hill estate will not resonate as much as it no doubt did in its hometown. The closest equivalent we have is the Barbican, and something tells me that a musical about that would be about as cheery as its architecture.

But thanks to the musical's heartfelt depth, a new aspect of its personality will emerge at its run at The National Theatre. Not only is Standing at the Sky's Edge a reflection of the idiosyncrasies of Sheffield's class dynamics and political strife, it is a poignant examination of culture in the broadest sociological sense. It asks how we belong, how we pass through, and how we exist as individuals within communities.

Its humanity will no doubt resonate anywhere wherever there is a melting pot of culture and communities. London and its awe-inspiring multi-culturalism certainly fits that bill.

Standing at the Sky's Edge plays at The National Theatre until 25 March.

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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