An interview with writer Beth Steel
An interview with…
writer Beth Steel
Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down unfolds over the course of a single wedding day. On the surface: fizz, rituals, awkward speeches. Beneath it: fault lines of family, class, migration, and the politics that seep into daily life. It’s a play rooted in the texture of working-class experience, written without apology and with an ear finely tuned to how people actually speak, fight and love.
Steel has established herself as one of the most distinctive playwrights in Britain. From Wonderland to House of Shades, her work has consistently held a mirror up to lives often excluded from the stage. With Till the Stars Come Down, she goes further still: not a sociological account, but a living, breathing community laid bare.
For me, this play struck an especially personal chord. Coming from a working-class background myself, I know how often the arts can feel like a world where our stories aren’t seen, respected or valued. Yet in Beth’s writing I recognised something familiar: the humour, the stubbornness, the contradictions, the tenderness — all the messy, complicated realities of working-class life. Even though I grew up in South Italy, I felt the unifying values and struggles that cut across borders in Europe.
What follows is a conversation with Beth Steel about her characters, her influences, and the urgency of putting working-class stories at the centre of our stages.
Credit: Manuel Harlan
When I watched Till the Stars Come Down I thought: this is exactly why I avoid weddings! I come from a working-class background, and I haven’t been to one in over ten years because the dynamics are just like those in your play – joyful and celebratory, but also dramatic and conflictual. Fascinating, but so intense when it’s your own family. It was hilarious to see that reflected, and moving too to see how much love and compassion runs through it.
Why did you choose a wedding as the setting to explore such strong themes – women’s lives, immigration, working-class struggles, family bonds?
I knew I wanted to write something with political undercurrents – deindustrialisation, Brexit, immigration, social reform. But I didn’t want those themes to be delivered as arguments between characters.
A wedding felt perfect: it’s supposed to be a day of joy, fizz, high-stakes emotions. These tensions rise to the surface, but they’re embedded in the fabric of people’s lives rather than debated head-on. That’s how I wanted the audience to encounter these characters: to sit with their lives, their choices, and the places where they have no choice – rather than watch them argue abstract positions.
And you capture so well the awkwardness of those family interactions. How did you approach writing that tension?
With a wedding it almost happens naturally. Everyone’s determined to have a good time, nobody wants a fight. So the play becomes a slow burn, like putting a multi-ingredient stew on a low flame – you know it will eventually boil over. Weddings are whole-day events, starting with ritual and ceremony, but over time people’s true behaviours spill out. In Britain alcohol helps with that.
Tell me about the women in the play. How do you see yourself reflected or challenged in them?
I love them all. Auntie Carol makes me laugh so much. I have my own Auntie Carol, Auntie Gloria, Auntie Jillian, Auntie Tracy, Auntie Claire. And I’m an Auntie Carol myself sometimes! I can’t wait to get older and grow into her. It’s a brilliant role for an older actress, say from 60s onwards; how exciting that that actress can walk onstage and have the audience in the palm of her hand, and being incredibly funny but also so direct.
I didn’t set out to write three sisters, but it just happened – no doubt Cechov filtered through subconsciously. It became a really beautiful exploration of sisters.
Hazel, for example, fascinates me. She’s incredibly afraid, and yet that fear makes her seem strong and immovable. Her fixity comes from not taking those steps – two paces this way, one pace that way. There’s a brutal moment when John asks her, “Why do you refuse to see what’s in front of you?” Denial runs through her story – denial about her marriage, about her sister, about the changes in the town.
But denial runs through the whole play. Denial that the town is changing – has already changed, and will change further still. Denial that the coal mines are gone – so who are we now? Denial about the climate – “hottest day of the year,” they said that last year too. It’s getting hotter, there’s fire, there are flames, people can smell burning. It’s a tiny world of a play, but that world is on fire. From the very beginning somebody can smell it, and everyone ignores it until it literally goes up in flames.
That’s how I think of it: at the end, the three sisters combust, if you like, but the bigger metaphor is of a world itself on fire.
Credit: Manuel Harlan
Did you feel you had to push against the male-dominated structures of British – and Western theatre more broadly – when writing these voices?
Yes, totally. I don’t think I’ve seen women like these on stage before. I haven’t seen an Auntie Carol, I haven’t seen a Hazel. Take the scene where Hazel’s husband says their marriage is ending. Instead of falling into the role of the damsel in distress – tired, crying, broken – she turns it back on him: “let’s see what happens to you if you walk out that door.”
That whole passage is economic. It’s a complete takedown of what his life will look like – paying maintenance, no benefits, no dole, no safety net. To me it’s like a reverse of Nora in A Doll’s House.
What I love is how much the women know who they are in this play – far more than the men do. They have a strong sense of their own identity. And I love seeing women who can be aggressive, who are unafraid to get in your face, to tell you exactly how life is. There’s no filter, no restraint. It’s passionate, forceful; and that’s where I’m from.
There’s a real excitement for me in seeing that on stage, in an auditorium, because I just haven’t seen it before in British Theatre. I’m not claiming I’m the only person who’s ever done it, of course not. But it’s still rare, and for me it feels new.
Theatre is still very middle class, both in terms of who makes it and who attends. Did you feel you were writing to that audience, or was your focus on putting working-class lives centre stage for working-class people to see themselves?
I certainly want working-class lives on stage; and on stage in a way that gives them depth and scale. And when I say that, I’m not excluding other kinds of work. There’s theatre I love that’s very different, and that’s been shattering and great. But what excites me about this play is what someone said to me just last night. An actress who’d seen the show told me: “I loved that these lives too could have Max Richter’s music.”
That’s exactly my point. Let’s get down and dirty and real and raw, let’s be hilarious, let’s show the grit – but let’s also have grandeur, romance, beauty. Let’s have the cosmic of the world in this place. Because why shouldn’t you get to see your life like that, when it is your life? Your world is every bit as large as the universe as anybody else’s.
And audiences, middle class or not, respond. And it excites me too when I watch something that doesn’t reflect me. Isn’t it amazing to sit with people who are different from you, but to sit with them properly? Not through a newspaper article that’s been cut and snipped into neat anecdotes, but to really live in their skin, to walk in their shoes.
Because at the end of the day, it’s still family, love, loss, ageing, change – universal themes.
There was a piece on Front Row that upset me because it suggested these lives shouldn’t be staged in London. The critic said it was “written in the North, for the North.” Why should that mean it doesn’t belong in London? These people aren’t different from us. Of course there are differences, but there’s also so much that’s unifying, human, brilliant. Nobody questions its staging in Japan where we are bringing it, so why draw a class line a hundred miles up the road?
Credit: Manuel Harlan
Immigration is central to the play, and feels especially relevant to today’s political debates. I was struck by how you capture both fear and hostility, but also moments of generosity and compassion. How did you find your way into that contradiction?
People contain multitudes. I do this all the time. I shoot from the hip and say one thing, and then an hour later, or a week later, I sit with it and think differently. I don’t want to see characters presented in only one way, as if theatre were just a debate: here’s one person with this side of the argument, here’s another with the opposite. Because most of us, if we’re honest, live with all of the argument inside ourselves. It’s constantly swirling, churning.
For me, what happens to Marek (a migrant from Poland) in the play is awful, but by the end I leave feeling that Sylvie and Marek will be alright. They have a future. They’ve made that future, they’ve chosen that change – and I think many in the family will get on board with it. Even Tony, when he’s holding the stone, has that realisation. He’s worked underground his whole life, he understands geological change profoundly, yet he resists change in his own life. Still, in that moment, he recognises: nothing can stay as it is, everything becomes something else.
Yes, change is frightening. Change can be hard. But it’s also exciting, and it’s inevitable.
Your writing is deeply political, but never in a didactic way. Do you see yourself as a political writer first, or a personal one?
I’d say personal first, now. In my first, second, even third play, I probably would have described myself as a political writer – certainly with “House of Shades”. But with “Till the Stars Come Down” I feel the start of a profound shift. I’m really finding my voice, and the kind of work I want to make. It feels like a body of work, a project – if that makes sense – and I’m deeply in love with it.
I’m in love with the territory I’ve marked out for myself. I don’t feel pressure to suddenly go off and write a farce, or a play about banks, or something completely different. I’m obsessed with family, obsessed with where I’m from. I just want to keep digging down and seeing what comes up.
I love watching plays that show different generations on stage. Of course I love plays with a strong lead character too, but there’s something extraordinary about a play where everybody sits at the centre, everyone gets their time. That’s what I adore about Cechov, the fabric of all those voices.
It takes time to learn how to compose that kind of piece, to make sure you don’t just hear the strings, or just the winds, but that everything comes together. Like in a symphony, where every instrument brings its part, each has its moment, but together you’re working towards the whole. And when that happens, it’s beautiful.
And if you could invite anyone – alive or dead – to sit at that wedding table in your play, who would it be?
Oh my God… I think I’d invite Cechov. He’d definitely be fine with the vodka – I’m not sure how he’d feel about the lager! I don’t think he’d say very much either. I imagine him with this small, soulful, amused smile, just quietly watching. Yes, I’d invite Cechov. Who would you invite, Giuliano?
I’d have to invite all of my mum’s sisters – she has eight of them. All my aunties together at that table would be an incredible alliance of women. That’s why the play felt so powerful to me personally: I could hear my mum and my aunties in those voices, in their arguments, their humour, their conflicts. It was intergenerational, and I thought: this is literally my family.
Oh my God – eight! Mine’s got five and I thought that was a lot. Messy, loud, wonderful. But now I’m wondering – what would we feed them? Not sure they’d love British food!
They would probably bring their own food and cook for everyone!
“Till the Stars Come Down” is at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 27 September.
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