Standing at the Sky’s Edge review: The best British musical since Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

I didn’t know much about Standing at the Sky’s Edge beforehand beyond the fact it was something of a tearjerker. That’s an understatement. By the end (it runs for nearly three hours including an interval) I was a blubbering wreck.

Such is the poignancy and power of this brilliant musical, which premiered in Sheffield in 2019 and returned last year. It arrives in London on the back of outstanding reviews and proves to be the best British musical since Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

And it’s an emotional wallop of a show, tying Richard Hawley’s music to a plot that charts 60 years in the life of a flat on the city’s Park Hill estate.

Now a listed building with its own Wikipedia page, Park Hill was fully opened in 1961 as community housing. Chris Bush’s superb script tells three stories across the intervening six decades as different occupants move into the same home.

First to take up residency, from 1960 until 1989, are loved-up young couple Rose (Rachael Wooding) and Harry (Robert Lonsdale). They seem to have life sorted until Thatcherism rears its ugly head.

Next comes Liberian refugee Joy (Faith Omole), who lives there with her cousins in what has become a dangerous, lawless, racist place. Then finally, in 2015, the flat is refashioned as a split-level duplex that posh southerner Poppy (Alex Young) moves into when her romantic London life falls apart.

These stories are told concurrently, with director Robert Hastie deftly juggling them in what is basically an encapsulation of modern Britain. There’s a miraculous moment where three meals are happening around the same table in different timeframes. And there are other dazzling moments, choreographed by Lynne Page, where the ensemble interweaves on Ben Stones’ strikingly brutalist set.

Hawley’s songs are by turns plaintive, folksy, rocky, rousing, and melancholy. They’re used as commentary or as an amplification of thoughts and feelings rather than in a traditional, plot-advancing way. The characters don’t sing to each other as you’d normally expect. When they burst into song, either solo or as a chorus, they use microphones and mic stands and it’s electrifying.

Everyone in the cast seems as impassioned by the stories they’re telling as we in the audience are riveted by them. Alex Young is endearingly sweet as the gay out-of-towner whose new life is rocked by the arrival of her ex-lover. Faith Omole has an incredibly rich singing voice. And Samuel Jordan is exceptional as he ages from tearaway teen with a heart of gold to a young provider for his family.

The story strands eventually link up in clever ways in what is both a very funny show (“Yorkshire is dripping with lesbians,” one character quips) and a devastating one when tragedy strikes.

Park Hill itself is still standing. By the end of the show, though, I felt like I’d been hit in the gut by a wrecking ball.

Rating: 5/5

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is at the National Theatre, London, until 25 March. Get tickets here.