Standing at the Sky's Edge: a 'potent', 'gorgeous' exploration of social issues

Four cast members of "Standing at the Sky's Edge" in a scene from the musical

A musical of 'rare intellectual and emotional ambition'

(Image credit: Eamonn M. McCormack / Getty Images)

published 8 March 2024

This "monumental musical love letter" to Park Hill, the brutalist housing estate in Sheffield, is a "stunning achievement", said Caroline McGinn in Time Out. First staged at the Crucible, it had a run at the National Theatre last year; and now, this singular show – "rightly garlanded with praise and awards" – has transferred to the West End. With songs by the one-time Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley, and written by Chris Bush, Standing at the Sky's Edge takes "retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical I've seen before".

Can a show that addresses decades' worth of social issues really thrive in "the brutal West End"? Yes, it can, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. Bush's "proudly theatrical conceit" is to have three different generations of residents "cohabit across timelines" in the same flat: we meet a young steelworker and his wife who are delighted to be its first occupants, in 1960; a trio of Liberian refugees in 1989; and a "well-spoken Londoner" in 2016 who has moved into what is now being called a "split-level duplex". All this is nimbly staged by director Robert Hastie, and with Hawley's romantic-realist songs superbly orchestrated and performed, it adds up to a show that works a "tender magic".

You can't fault the musicianship, which is top-class, said Clive Davis in The Times, but the songs "sometimes seem to have been inserted into the action almost at random". You start to wonder if the musical numbers are really moving the story on – and too much plot is then crammed into a "confusing final quarter". But Hawley's music – "full of melancholy, tenderness, warmth and yearning, hammering at your heart demanding to be let in" – is beautiful enough to overcome such problems, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. If, as with Park Hill itself, you embrace the show "warts and all, it's hard to feel anything other than enriched and often deeply moved by it". This is a musical of "rare intellectual and emotional ambition"; it "deserves to be a huge hit".