JOHN NATHAN Steel City
The assumption made by Sheffield Theatres is that the world — and particularly the venue’s city — needs stories of redemption and survival. And they’re right, of course. To that end playwright Chris Bush has written five Sheffield-set monologues each separated by versions of Sheffield-spawned pop music, performed by a quintet of some of the country’s most talented female musical theatre performers.
After an exhilarating dose of The Arctic Monkeys’ I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, Anna-Jane Casey takes us back to 1984 with a grownup’s perspective of childhood.
It is a piece pungent with the reality of living in the bleakest of housing: her dad’s nuclear bunker built out of fear of the coming apocalypse — a shelter against two kinds of strikes, nuclear and miners’.
After a burst of Def Leppard Jocasta Almgill tells a story that also recalls a parent’s obsession, this time a mother whose Labour activism was both an inspiration to her daughter and then symptomatic of political and personal disillusionment.
It is a relationship that charts political failure, from Neil Kinnock’s speech declaring victory over Thatcher, all the way to Corbyn via Brexit, both of which her mother supported with fervent certainty.
Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau’s socially distanced production separates its performers with barriers of clear perspex, and the handheld cameras lend the evening a constantly moving guerilla feel. It is as if we are on the frontier of what is possible before theatres reopen their doors to audiences.
The evening is also brimful of Sheffield history, such as the great flood of 1864 which killed 240 people when a dam burst and Loxley Valley was hit by 700 million gallons of water. Bush poetically links that disaster to the one at Hillsborough while Jodie Prenger’s final monologue wraps up all that has gone before with her character’s own tale of pandemic betrayal.