In 2016, on the day after the Brexit vote, my home town’s pub opened early and celebratory pints were drunk underneath union flags. I was in a rehearsal room in London surrounded by the shellshocked and outraged. The media I read on the tube home reiterated what I’d heard all day: these leave voters were ignorant and racist. My town voted just over 70% for leave. Three years later the constituency voted Conservative for the first time in its history. In a recent council election it voted Reform. There comes a time when the unthinkable becomes inevitable.
My town is in the East Midlands. Where it was once coal mining and manufacturing that provided work for many people, it is now a huge distribution warehouse for Sports Direct. Many eastern European people have made Shirebrook their home and work at the warehouse. I have been thinking about towns such as mine – and there are many of them – with the recent outpouring of anger and xenophobia towards asylum seekers and migrants.
One of the things I treasure most about writing plays is the opportunity to suspend judgment – my characters speak and I listen; my characters do and I watch. I find it freeing and am astonished how much they have surprised me: characters are as vast as we allow them to be – and people in real life are no different. Yet we are often at pains to shrink people, simplify them: I can do it in my own life as well. It allows us to tell that joke or “win” that argument.
I have no argument to win in my play, Till the Stars Come Down – and the jokes are never at the characters’ expense. The play takes place on the day of a wedding between a local woman and a Polish immigrant. It is the story of a multigenerational working-class family grappling with a changing community and world, as well as their own swelling desires and losses. It is passionate and hilarious and deeply political, but you won’t hear characters arguing about Brexit or Reform. They are living politics, not commenting on them.
I’m inspired by Chekhov, whose plays are not immediately thought of as political. He doesn’t tell us what his own political opinions are and his characters very rarely do. And yet the plays are about families living through significant cultural and economic changes in societies that are on the brink of revolution. When Chekhov is writing, the first Russian Revolution of 1905 is still some time away, but listen carefully and you will hear the bomb ticking underneath the floorboards of the families’ homes.
I think there is a ticking to be heard now, not under dusty floorboards, but in the bellies of the people I am writing about. They want more, and often demand it. They are unfiltered and flammable. There are moments in the play where they sense their own place in the cosmos, when their lives have a sudden grandeur and mystery, and also moments when they feel small and frustrated, and they lash out.
It’s not often I see that range of experience in our cultural landscape. When I do see representations of white working-class lives in the Midlands or the north of England, they are often set in the past. As if there’s a great uncertainty about who these people are now: better to revert back to when we did know. But we have to get to know them because they aren’t only in the past; it’s quite possible that they are going to define the future.
I can be suspicious of pronouncements about the arts changing society. But I do believe the theatre can be a place where, among other things, we sit and listen to people we wouldn’t otherwise encounter and experience their life with them as it unfolds in front of us. We can’t change channels, block them online, cross the road; we can still shrink them with our prejudices, refuse their vastness, but many of us won’t. Instead we will sit in the dark, laughing and crying, falling in love with them one moment, only to be infuriated the next. A lot like spending time with your own family.
I never imagined this play would be performed around the world, from Tokyo to Athens to Montreal. That failure of imagination stemmed from not believing that a story about a particular working-class family in a particular Midlands town could be seen as universal. How could I not know that we are all profoundly different and exactly the same? The larger human family we are a part of cuts across cultures and classes when it lays bare our emotional lives: what it is to feel joy, shame, love, grief, desire, to fear the future rushing towards us – and not be ready for it.
It’s always nearer than we think, the future. It is made out of the present; it is in fact today. Often in Greek tragedy, human beings attain knowledge of their situation all too late. In my play, set in another fearsome summer, characters often remark on the heat, on fire, as if they already know their world is about to go up in flames – and yet they do not change course. We have been trying to put out fires too, local and global, and carrying on much the same. I think by now it’s clear where that leads.
If the end is the beginning, I will leave you with the first line of my play: “I can smell burning.”
Beth Steel is a playwright. Till the Stars Come Down is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London until 27 September
