Standing at the Sky’s Edge: Working-Class Heroes

The cast of Standing at the Sky's Edge in the West End. (Photo: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg)

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is playing to enthusiastic audiences in the West End after transferring from the National’s Olivier Theatre. Its original home was the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where it opened in 2019 and again in 2022, and Sheffield is its setting – specifically Park Hill, a high-rise public housing project built in 1959 to replace the slum housing that had dominated the area since the 1920s. Standing at the Sky’s Edge is a Brechtian jukebox musical that chronicles the history of Park Hill. The music is by singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, a son of Sheffield who played in several Britpop bands before going solo in the early days of the millennium. Hawley isn’t well known on this side of the Atlantic, but a friend turned me onto his music after he released his third solo album, Coles Corner. He’s a balladeer, a working-class romantic with a throbbing, plaintive voice and a distinctive stripped-down lyricism. His music is the beating heart of the production and the musical director, Alex Beetschen, and the beautiful, full-throated voices of the ensemble bring out its latent exuberance.

The show’s protagonist is Park Hill itself, which we see over the course of six decades as the flats are integrated with African refugees and West Indian immigrants and eventually gentrified. The book by Chris Bush intercuts three separate timelines, 1960-1989, 1989-2004 and 2015-2020, each focusing on a single story, and sometimes all three overlap on the wonderful tiered set by Ben Stones, which also houses an eight-piece band at the back of two of the levels. When representatives of all of the stories gather at the same dining-room table early in the first act, you might think of one of Alan Ayckbourn’s classic comedies, but Bush and the director, Robert Hastie, aren’t going for farce; the point of the overlap is to explore the themes of community and legacy. If you were fortunate enough to see the National’s through-sung 2011 triumph London Road, which is also Brechtian in style and the only other musical I can think of where the main character is a neighborhood, it too may come to mind. But London Road, set in a middle-class street that has been infiltrated by streetwalkers who have become the target of a serial killer, is also a documentary with links to the work of Erwin Piscator, Brecht’s theatrical progenitor, and American Depression-era collages like One-Third of a Nation; the characters sing lyrics culled from interviews with the residents of London Road. Both it and Standing at the Sky’s Edge are sui generis.

The earliest story in the chronology is about Harry (Joel Harper-Jackson) and Rose (Rachael Wooding), newlyweds who are among the first inhabitants of Park Hill. He’s a young foreman at a steel plant and a union activist whose faith in the ascension of the working class is worn down in the Thatcher years. When he loses his job because of his union loyalties, Rose turns out to be the one with resilience. She exhorts him to keep fighting, like Edna in the “Joe and Edna” episode of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, but the destructive power of his wounded pride and disillusionment is stronger even than his love for her. Their marriage falls apart and he drinks himself to death. Rose moves on, leaving the flat to their seventeen-year-old son Jimmy (Samuel Jordan), a sharp-witted, heart-whole lad with a dash of poetry in his soul who has inherited the proletarian promise of his father’s youth.

Jimmy is the link between the first narrative and the second, which begins when a Liberian family, escaping the violence at home, move into Park Hill. Teenage Joy (Elizabeth Ayodele) and her cousin George (Baker Mukasa) are taken in by Grace (Sharlene Hector), an older relative. At first Joy, who has no idea where her parents are, is homesick and ill at ease in this new world, but soon she begins to respond to its energies. The problem is that Grace is so anxious about the racial tensions in the neighborhood where they’re among the first Black tenants that she locks Joy in for her safety, and Joy has to fight for some independence. Jimmy meets her soon after she moves in and is entranced by her. They become lovers and she gets pregnant, and as he struggles to make a living for them while she struggles to forge a career as a nurse (she originally intended to attend medical school) against the backdrop of a physically deteriorating environment, they manage to hold onto each other. But their romance, which is immortalized in a graffito Jimmy scrawls on a bridge in Park Hill, ends in tragedy.

Connie, their grown-up daughter (played by Mel Love), is the link between the second and third stories; she’s also the musical’s occasional narrator. She ends up being the rental agent at Park Hill in the 2010’s, when the buildings have been renovated, and among the new folks she brings in is Poppy (Laura Pitt-Pulford), an educated middle-class young woman who runs away from London after her relationship with Nikki (Lauryn Redding), to whom she was engaged, disintegrates. Poppy’s tale, which is about her inability to move on from Nikki and Nikki’s attempts to get her back, is the only uninteresting one, and because it doesn’t really develop the themes of the musical, it feels grafted on. It ends optimistically, unlike Harry and Rose’s and Joy and Jimmy’s narratives, but not too convincingly.

 Bush’s failed attempt to create an upbeat finale isn’t the only flaw in the book of the musical. She’s very good at writing complex, compelling characters but less good at sketching in the history of the setting: the glimpses we’re offered of the stages of that history are scattered and thin. The first-act finale, “There’s a Storm A-Comin’,” and the title song, which serves as the second-act opener, inform us that Park Hill is undergoing bad times but the text doesn’t delve into them, and Hastie’s idea to have the ensemble toss trash around the stage as the show moves into intermission is tepid and has an air of desperation about it. (Luckily “There’s a Storm A-Comin’” is a terrific, driving number.) But there’s so much going on in Standing at the Sky’s Edge, and so much of it is affecting and fresh, that I had no trouble forgiving its less inspired elements. Jordan and Ayodele and especially Wooding and Harper-Jackson give fine performances, and Harper-Jackson’s is the standout on a stage full of potent voices. His renditions of Harry’s two touching ballads, “My Little Treasures” and “For Your Lover Give Some Time” are the vocal highlights of the production. True to its Brechtian agenda, the songs always comment on the characters and the situations; even when they begin as or migrate to individual stories – as when Nikki implores Poppy, “Open Up Your Door” – other members of the cast take them up and they function as cross-fades through the entire community. This idea works better in some numbers than in others – I’d say it’s most successful when Pitt-Pulford and Redding join Harper-Jackson on “For Your Lover Give Some Time” – but it always resonates. This isn’t a perfect musical, but it’s an inspiriting and highly original one.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.