Staged and Scribbled

A wedding is a special place for families to gather, and you can almost always be sure of some drama happening.

The same goes for Sylvia and Marek’s wedding. Sylvia, the youngest of her three sisters, is marrying the Polish Marek, and despite the family not being the biggest fan of foreigners coming to their country, they all gather to celebrate the love between the happy couple. As minutes pass, you quickly realise that a lot is being swept under the rug, and just like Sylvia, you get a feeling that something bad might happen.

In Scandinavia, we are taught that theatre is not about how loud you can scream but how deeply you can feel. 

Beth Steel, Bijan Sheibani, and the female characters in Till the Stars Come Down are not trying to adhere to ancient scripture. They are being faced with the highest stress and emotional turmoil, and they refuse to be silent about the pain they are in. 

The three sisters, who together have fought to survive strikes, financial hardships, and the death of their mother, will show you exactly how they feel about their further challenges. Their love for each other vs the lives that they’ve chosen will be tested, and they’ll express exactly how despair hits them. It is a much-needed change in female characters, and it is as intense as it is empowering. 

The youngest sister marrying a foreigner, a polish one at that could have opened for so many important dialogs from Malek point of view not only entering a new, dysfunctional family but a foreign one at that, the opportunities for Marek’s character to be fleshed out is slightly skated over but Julian Kostov still manages to give his character a lot of depth.

However, the loud, hilarious, and emotional women of the play more than make up for it. Despite their flaws and subtle (or maybe not so subtle) xenophobia, you can’t help but to laugh as well as cry with them. Their honest love and hope for each other are felt, and show us that there is more that unites us than divides us. A thank you should be given as well as hope for more female stories to be portrayed as raw as this.