Beth Steel: Deindustrialisation is the great unspoken story behind much of what we see today

Beth Steel is one of British theatre’s most distinctive voices. Born in Nottinghamshire and raised in a former coal mining community, she has built a body of work rooted in the realities of working-class life, past and present. Her plays, from the Evening Standard Award winning Wonderland to The House of Shades, explore big political shifts through the lives of ordinary people, mixing sharp character work with dark humour and emotional depth. 

In this conversation with The Skylark, she reflects on writing with truth and contradiction, loss, and survival, of community in post-industrial towns, and why she resists putting people in boxes. She also speaks about her latest Olivier Award nominated play, Till the Stars Come Down, currently enjoying a critically acclaimed West End run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 27 September. Set over the course of a single wedding day between a local woman and a Polish man, it explores decades of change and tension in a Nottinghamshire town, and what happens when love and identity meet in the same room.

I never know what I’m going to write about. It bubbles up within me. I’ve marked the territory of where I’m from – a postage stamp on the map, but one I find endlessly rich - as the place I want to excavate a play out of. I love the people, as much as they can infuriate me. Like family. I start digging, and often find things I didn’t expect. When I begin, I might think a play is about one thing, then another thing rears up and pulls me somewhere else entirely.

My last two plays, The House of Shades and Till the Stars Come Down, are both set where I’m from. I began The House of Shades after the Brexit vote. I’d lived in London for many years, worked in theatre, and many of the people around me were shocked it had happened. Shocked, and with little idea why. That made me want to create work where people could sit together in the dark for two and a half hours with characters they fall in love with, laugh with, disagree with and are infuriated by. We’ve lost that sense of humanity: that connection that we’re all part of, and theatre can give it back.

Then came the 2019 election and the fall of the so-called “red wall.” My town was one of many that voted 70% for Brexit and then, having never been anything but Labour, voted for Boris Johnson. It would have been unthinkable once. Now it’s gone Reform. We can’t just turn up to these places when there’s an election to win. We have to witness people’s lives, sit with them, get to know each other again.

That’s the impulse behind Till the Stars Come Down. I wanted to set it over the course of a single day – a wedding between a local woman and an Eastern European man – and use that as a lens on the changes I’ve seen in towns like mine. Shirebrook, where the family in the play lives, once had a coal mine. Decades later, what sits on top of it is the Sports Direct warehouse. The company’s strategy was to bring in young people from Eastern Europe to a town that had been completely homogenous, and that had suffered mass unemployment.

Till the Stars Come Down Photo Credit Manuel Harlan

I didn’t want to write a play where people argue about politics, but where they live them; where politics is the warp and weft of their lives. A wedding felt right. It’s joyful, full of promise; it’s about today and tomorrow. And yet it can hold decades of history, loss, change, and tension.

Theatre audiences don’t need to be spoon-fed an argument. If they’ve felt something deeply, they’ll think about it afterwards. You can read endless articles about an issue, but one novel can change your perspective; not because it gives you more facts, but because it taps into character and empathy. Laughing with people is how you cry with them.

That’s why I’ve never seen entertainment and thought as separate things. If a scene is charged and someone says something that makes the whole auditorium burst out laughing, that’s not me trying to “lighten the mood.” It’s truthful. People say strange, inappropriate things at climactic moments because they want to let the air out. The humour in my work is rooted in the mentality of where I’m from and in the characters. I love big emotional swings, where you can move from one state to another in seconds, even in the same line.

I’m suspicious of anyone who sets out thinking their play will change the world. When I’m writing, the work is embryonic; being formed in the dark. I’m not consciously bringing in big, weighty questions; those might arise afterwards, but by then the work is already done.

We still have to be reminded of how few women, how few people of colour, how few disabled people are getting work on stage.

What I do know is that there are voices we still don’t hear enough in British theatre. Early-stage development for playwrights has contracted in recent years. Even big venues have reduced the number of new plays they put on, so there are fewer opportunities. It’s rare to hear regional or working-class voices; more so in London, but still true regionally. The imbalances are documented because they have to be. We still have to be reminded of how few women, how few people of colour, how few disabled people are getting work on stage.

Deindustrialisation is the great unspoken story behind much of what we see today. In towns like mine, the closure of industries stripped away not just jobs but identity. You lose workplaces where politics is part of daily life, where there are unions. At Sports Direct you get your shifts by text; miss them and you’ve no work for the week. Economic change is only part of it; the work was also a source of pride and belonging. Immigration became a flashpoint because it touched the last piece of that identity that was left. When someone new arrives, visibly different, it can trigger that struggle over “what are we now?”

The personalities of political leaders are just the surface. Underneath is something deeper; decades of economic, social, and cultural change. And yet, in many towns, you still find the same generational togetherness people romanticise when they travel abroad. Walk into a working men’s club on a Saturday night and you’ll see grandparents, parents, children all together. That sense of community hasn’t gone entirely.

In politics, in media, in culture, we too often speak at people rather than with them. 

People want to see themselves reflected back and to be spoken to in a way they understand. There’s not enough of that. In politics, in media, in culture, we too often speak at people rather than with them. You can’t convince anyone if you only want to hear your own views echoed. I can accept that others feel differently because they live differently. That doesn’t mean I have to agree, but if I can imagine their life, maybe I can have more empathy; even a little more respect.

Recently I went back to my town with Channel 4 News for a piece on the play. I realised the only time a microphone is put in front of people there is when someone wants a soundbite they’ve already decided on. People were reluctant to speak because they didn’t want to be presented in a certain way. We’ve lost respect for each other.

I never plan for a play to be political, but when you dig into people’s lives, politics is already there. My role is to give it space to breathe, to let audiences sit together and experience people they might otherwise never encounter. That’s the work.

As for the act of writing, I think you need a certain sensitivity to do it in a way that truly observes human nature. In my early twenties I thought the world looked one way; at some point I became a writer because I started looking outwards. That’s not to say writers are more sensitive than anyone else; nurses, tractor drivers, anyone can be deeply sensitive. But to live inside another person’s shoes, even imaginatively, and not judge them, that’s the heart of it for me.

In life I’m capable of shooting from the hip like anyone else. But a play forces me to think differently, to find what’s magnificent, brave, struggling, and beautiful in each person, even those others might call “toxic.” That’s about truth. I don’t trust portrayals that put people in boxes; if you really believed your point, you’d let someone live it in all its contradictions.

There are moments in Till the Stars Come Down that are cosmic in scale, but they’re still just one person – all of us. As Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” Sensitivity, for me, is about wanting to find that in each character, and taking the time to do it. It’s about resisting fear – fear of contradiction, fear of empathy – and ultimately telling the truth.

The acclaimed National Theatre production Till The Stars Come Down is on at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 27 September in a co-production with Eleanor Lloyd Productions, Fiery Angel, Short Street Productions and Access Entertainment.

This conversation took place on 13 August and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.