ESTATE OF GRACE
Powerful musical about a notorious block of council flats is a terrific tale of hope, despair and survival
Standing At The Sky’s Edge (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield) Verdict: Brutalism made beautiful
WHEN a show connects with its audience as this one does, it’s like a force of nature.
And when the famously phlegmatic people of Sheffield give a standing ovation at the end of a midweek matinee, you know you’ve seen a miracle. You’ve just got to stand back and admire Richard Hawley and Chris Bush’s gutsy new musical.
Where to start? Well, it’s the story of Sheffield’s Park Hill council estate, a massive edifice that sits on the ridge above the city’s railway station like a socialist Mount Rushmore.
A piece of ‘brutalist’ architecture, the concrete leviathan is reviled and admired in equal measure.
But love it or loathe it, what became a byword for crime and deprivation in the Eighties won middle- class redemption when it was listed back in 1998.
Park Hill is now halfway through redevelopment for a new generation of occupants.
As the show proudly tells us, though, it’s people who make homes; not architects. Chris Bush’s story is, accordingly, an intimate epic, telling of different families in the same flat between 1960 and today.
We have a newlywed steelworker and his wife displaced by industrial unrest and factory closures.
THEYgive way to refugees escaping war in Liberia in 1989. And following the estate’s redevelopment in 2016, we get a female yuppie on the run from London and a failed relationship.
Each of their crisscrossing stories is told in broad brushstrokes and poignant details, sometimes simultaneously within the same space.
And it’s deliciously seasoned with salty Sheffield wit. We’re told Henderson’s Relish has a silent ‘h’ at the beginning. But my favourite was in reference to romance blooming in Park Hill’s sometimes stinking stairwells: ‘ Love is the world’s most effective air freshener.’
Most excitingly, Hawley’s music drives the story in unexpected
ways. It’s such a pleasure to have the music written by a singersongwriter who doesn’t kowtow to theatrical convention.
We get terrific company numbers with the foreboding of There’s A Storm Coming and a stadium size whopper in the title song.
But I had regular lumps in my throat thanks to torch songs including Leaving Lady Solitude and the blazing heartache of Open Up Your Door. With Ben Stones’s monumental stage set recreating a concrete crosssection of Park Hill for the band above an open-plan flat, Robert Hastie’s ensemble production digs deep into the local community theatre without dips in acting standards.
Alongside them, Alex Young glows as the lovelorn yuppie struggling to bury her feelings for Maimuna Memon, who plays her feisty and infuriating girlfriend. Meanwhile, Rachel Wooding is a rock as the hardy wife of a broken steel worker; as is Adam Hugill, playing her son who sees off racist bullies to marry the young woman from Liberia.
And as that young woman Faith Omole damn near steals the show with a performance full of frustration, joy and strength that climaxes in a quite unexpected and utterly heartbreaking final scene.
I challenge even someone from Leeds not to love it.