Standing at the Sky's Edge Review

The cast of Standing at the Sky's Edge

Standing at the Sky’s Edge’s triumphant return sings of love and hope across the generations.

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is a love letter. To our partners, to our families, to our homes. With the music of Sheffield musician Richard Hawley, every breath of this production sings a love for the north of England.

The three-hour musical spans over six decades, telling the stories of 3 different families all connected by the same flat. Under the pen of book writer Chris Bush, we meet Rose and Harry - played honestly and beautifully by Rachael Wooding and Joel Harper-Jackson respectively - as they move into their first home together. Jump forward twenty years as Grace (Sharlene Hector), George (Baker Mukasa), and Joy (a gripping portrayal by Elizabeth Ayodele) move into the same property, looking for a safer home. In the modern day, Bush introduces us to Poppy, played by Laura Pitt-Pulford whose talent will break your heart and mend it again, hundreds of times over.

Between the performances of a stellar principal cast, Bush’s words and Ben Stone’s exciting designs - a huge brutalist set that transforms the Gillian Lynne and costumes that instantly inform but never patronise - I felt as though I was not watching but living these moments with each of the families. The slightly smaller nature of this theatre, compared to the Olivier Theatre that it was most recently performed in, puts you right into their apartment, feeling their feelings, sharing their Henderson’s. I became part of their furniture.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the exceptional script delivered by Chris Bush that there were a few moments when I felt that I didn’t want an actor to arrive downstage with a mic stand and halt the story. Every beat, every letter of his book is crafted to serve the narrative, and I am not sure if the same could be said for every moment of music, for every lyric. I sometimes wished for the microphones to either be a more prominent feature (particularly in Act 2 where we start with every performer using one, to them near instantly being forgotten), or for there to be none at all. I wondered if Robert Hastie’s otherwise dynamic direction sometimes felt conflicted between a ‘musical’ and a ‘play-with-music’.

Nevertheless, it can’t be such a bad thing if an audience is left pining to know what happens next, and with the excellent orchestrations of Tom Deering, each song filled the auditorium almost as expertly and passionately as Mark Henderson’s genius lightning design, which conveyed every mood and emotion in a way you didn’t realise you were feeling.

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is a love letter to Sheffield and its people. But I think it’s more than it knows. I think it’s a love letter to British Musical Theatre and the exceptional creativity that we harbour. I think every piece of this puzzle fits together in a way that you don’t want to miss.