By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****1/2

WHEN?: Saturday 16 March 2024 RUNTIME: 150 minutes (with a 20-minute interval) Update: Transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket 1 July through 27 September 2025 Tickets

‘I’m not leaving. I haven’t danced the Macarena yet,’ says the quite brilliant Olivier Awards-nominated Lorraine Ashbourne (main picture, right) playing drunken Auntie Carol who is being ushered towards a taxi from her niece’s wedding.

• Read on for reasons including how the campaign for this hilarious comedy to reach a wider audience starts now

You may have seen Ashbourne excel in James Graham’s similarly geographically set Sherwood on BBC1 in 2022 and her Olivier Awards recognition this week was 1 of 2 nominations for this show which also included Best New Play for Beth Steel (Labyrinth, Hampstead Theatre) up against acclaimed National Theatre West End transfers Graham’s Dear England and Jack Thorne’s The Motive And The Cue.

Drawing on Chekhov’s Three Sisters and even To Kill A Mockingbird Steel expertly gives us a play in 3 locations: in a family house before the wedding of Sylvia, played by Sinead Matthews who really had us rooting for her character, to Polish immigrant Marek, at the wedding’s top table and by the buffet away from the evening reception.

Set in the Midlands where a large immigrant Polish community has settled to find its fortune, Steel expertly crafts a family tale where 2 brothers are warring for unknown reasons, the 3 sisters mourn their dead mother and the loss of the coal industry decades ago still rankles.

The setting is simple. A mirroball sits glittering above a circular green revolve which occasionally turns. Minimal props are introduced to suggest women getting ready for a wedding, the top table at which spurned Aunty Carol has to add chairs for her and her husband because she doesn’t want to miss out on the action and a buffet table where guests who leave the wedding’s reception bump into each other or even slope off for a quickie.

Steel’s naturalistic language vividly conveys the comedy of a working class family letting its hair down but also the secrets and lies behind 4-times married sister Maggie’s (Lisa McGrillis (film The Pass and pictured right below) reminding us more of her recent TV role in Sex Education than her similarly brilliant comic turn in TV’s Mum) sudden disappearance and occasional racism that rears its head.

The brilliance of Stars is in its thought and attention to detail. At the interval the audience can hear a wedding reception-type soundtrack including Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head and Cher’s Believe as if coming from afar and as the wedding begins Marek played by Marc Wootton shakes hands with the audience as if guests like recent West End transfer A Mirror.

In a play dominated by strong female performances particularly Lucy Black’s sister Hazel who is flawed but utterly ignites at the show’s close, we can’t go without mentioning Derek Riddell as Hazel’s unemployed and weak husband John who similarly unravels throughout the show.

This last night wins a completely deserved standing ovation and was filmed so we hope for an NTLive cinema opportunity to see it again. But the Dorfman’s intimate nature and setting in the round means it would be perfectly suited for a transfer to the West End’s @SohoPlace.

Directed by Bijan Sheibani (Barber Shop Chronicles, National), we’d hate for such a timely, dramatically hard-hitting and laugh-out-loud funny comedy as Stars to disappear without the shine of a much-deserved West End transfer.

Ashbourne’s horrifically dynamite Aunty Carol creation is on a par with Alison Steadman’s amazing Beverly from Abigail’s Party, deserves a far wider audience and, frankly, wouldn’t allow it any other way.

• Main picture and others by Manuel Harlan via Facebook courtesy National Theatre Tickets
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