Forged in Mansfield: local playwright Beth Steel’s on her play Till the Stars Come Down and going international

Tell us about Till the Stars Come Down…

It was first staged in 2024 at the National Theatre in London, and written while I was writer-in-residence there. It became a massive sold-out show, which took me by surprise. Somehow this play, set in a town in Nottinghamshire that no one down there had ever heard of, managed to become a universal story. It got an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play, and the actress Lorraine Ashbourne was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It then went into the West End for a long run. There are around twenty international productions of it now. No one changes it; they keep the context of where it’s set. It’s been very special, and very surprising.

What inspired you to write it? Was it people you knew in real life?
There was a play I wrote before called The House of Shades, which wasn’t my first play, but it felt like a breakthrough and where I found my voice. That was a family drama set in Mansfield and I basically fell in love with creating characters from that world. I also thought a wedding would be a fantastic event to put on stage. So many plays are built around funerals and wakes; which makes sense, because it’s a day full of emotion, secrets and high stakes. But a wedding has all of that too, plus it’s one of the most joyous and hilarious events there is and it’s about looking to the future not the past.

Has the play changed much for its transfer to Nottingham?
In terms of the script, no, but it is a brand new cast and a genuinely new production. The previous National Theatre and West End productions were essentially the same show in different spaces, but for Nottingham we’re doing it a bit differently. I was in the rehearsal room in the first week, watching the director Caroline Steinbeis work, and I’m genuinely excited by it all.

Let’s talk about you. What were you like as a kid growing up in Warsop?
I was a ‘chuffer’ or a ‘bogger’ as my mum would say… no, I was actually very well behaved and the kind of child who would create her own homework if she didn’t get enough. 

You joined Nottingham’s Television Workshop at quite a young age. Was that where your interest in theatre began?
Yes, I think I joined the Workshop at the age of seven, alongside my sister, and it’s a completely amazing place. Ian Smith, who ran it for decades, still keeps an eye on casting for me now and we’ve got three ex-Workshop actors in this production. The Workshop has had such a profound impact on so many people’s lives; obviously there are people like Samantha Morton and Bella Ramsey, who have gone onto extraordinary careers. But also there are even more people who used the confidence it gave them to do something completely different. My sister Amy was at the Workshop with me and she’s a fine artist now – showing her paintings around the world.  I don’t know if I'd have become a writer or if she’d have become a painter without the Workshop. It takes you out of the environment of what you think is possible and puts you into a different one.

At what point did you realise you wanted to pursue writing, rather than acting?
To be honest, I don’t really consider myself to have ever been an actress. When I started writing, acting wasn’t part of the equation at all. I left the Workshop at sixteen and appeared in a couple of things on screen as little more than an extra. I moved to Greece for five years, then I came to London and worked as a waitress. In my mid-twenties I became obsessed with reading and one day I saw a play in the West End; which was David Harrower’s Blackbird. I hadn’t seen much theatre before that, because it always seemed expensive, but that play was so electric that I became obsessed with it. I’d never written a play, or really anything before, but I left knowing I could do it. I was probably delusional, but you have to start somewhere. 

Is that when you wrote your first play Ditch?
No, it was before then. I wrote something else first, very influenced by Blackbird and submitted it to the Royal Court. They said no to the play but offered me a place in one of their writers’ groups for six months. That’s when I wrote Ditch. My sister had seen a competition for two new plays to be produced at a prestigious festival in Suffolk. I was on £60 a week of Jobseeker’s Allowance at the time and I spent a tenner of it printing my play at the library and getting the bus to hand-deliver it. Amazingly I won!

After this you wrote Wonderland, a play about the miners’ strike set at Welbeck Colliery…
That’s right. Wonderland opened in 2014 in London, but didn’t reach Nottingham until 2018. It was an award winning play but had a large cast and was expensive to put on so it didn’t make it outside of London for quite a few years. Then Adam Penford got the position as Artistic Director at the Playhouse and it was the first play he directed there. It worked so brilliantly, so they brought it back again the following year and later it went on to Newcastle as well.

You’re the daughter of a miner yourself. How involved was your dad in the creation of the play?
Obviously that background was always there when I was growing up and he’d tell me about the world underground; not the politics, but the craft, the stories, the characters and the humour. It was an extraordinary world, which I’d never seen captured on stage. I wasn’t intending to write about the strike at all at first as I thought that had already been done. But after failing to write much for about a year, I did three weeks of reading on the strike and found it riveting. It said so much about the state, about capitalism and the beginning of neoliberalism.

My dad hadn’t read it until he saw it and I think he was a bit terrified as there was a lot to get right, and a lot to honour. The premiere in London came in the same week he retired. He seemed to like it and he has always been supportive of my work. 

After this you wrote Labyrinth, a play about a banking crisis in the US and Latin America…
Yes, I started writing that around the time of the 2008 financial collapse, when the banks got caught up in what was happening in Greece and all of us were learning new terms like ‘subprime’. I started reading beyond the headlines and realised there’d been an almost identical crisis in the 1970s, between American banks and Latin America. It’s always fascinating, because we never learn. I wanted to bring those events to life in a fictionalised world based on a factual one.

After this, what drew you to setting your next two plays (House of Shades and Till the Stars Come Down) back in Mansfield?
I wanted to make something visually electrifying, with real grandeur, where people still say ‘mam’... that’s been my thing ever since House of Shades. You can get completely embroiled in the family drama aspect of Till the Stars Come Down, but the play is also cosmic. There’s a moment where the characters become planets and do a kind of planet dance of the universe and that’s the scale I think our lives deserve. Why should everyone from Mansfield have to watch powerful people in Succession to see something extraordinary? Why can’t our lives look extraordinary?

What have you got coming up next? I’ve heard you might have some screenwriting projects on the go..?
Yes, Till the Stars Come Down is being made into a film. We have a director attached already, who I'm really excited about, but it won’t be out for a few years yet. I’m also writing a new play for the National Theatre, which is another family drama, set in Nottingham at Christmas. I do find writing incredibly hard and all-consuming though. I say no to almost everything and can only ever work on one thing at a time.

Does the new play have a title?
No. I never title a play until the very end, sometimes not even until the fourth draft. It comes last because I like the audience to watch the whole thing and then understand why it’s called that. 

What’s your process like as a writer?
I work from an office in my home in London, which is definitely a luxury. I couldn’t work in a café as I act like a crazy person at the desk, speaking lines out loud and running up and down the stairs when I get excited about something. I work from around 10am in the morning to 6-7pm each night. I don’t set any word or page targets and if I get one page done, I’m happy.

You’ve had some brilliant actors in your plays like Anne-Marie Duff and Lorraine Ashbourne. Who’s left on the bucket list?
There are many actresses I’m obsessed with, currently; Jodie Comer, Claire Foy, Monica Dolan and Olivia Colman. Every time I discover one is from a regional background, I get very excited. I’d find it extremely difficult to write with a particular actor in mind though – that’s just not something I’m able to do.

What do you get up to when you come back to Notts
?My mum’s got a massive family, so there are always family parties and I turn up to as many of those as I can, because otherwise I don’t get to see everyone. Mostly I just go back and sit with my mum and dad, screaming with laughter. Sometimes I have my notebook on the table too, thinking that some of the best things I hear might end up going in somewhere.

What do you do for pleasure, when you’re not writing?
I go to the theatre in London five or six times a month and to a lot of art galleries. My sister Amy is an artist, and seeing her work puts me in a different mindset. I read a lot and for the last two years or so I’ve done a lot more travelling than I ordinarily would, because I keep getting invited to see the show internationally and can’t say no. They usually pay for my travel, my hotel, and sometimes even my partner. A week in Norway isn’t hard to be persuaded into.

Where across the world have you been to see your plays performed?
Tokyo, Athens, Stockholm, Norway, Croatia and Prague. Till the Stars Come Down opens in Iceland, Denmark, Peru and Mexico next spring and Estonia in October, although I can’t make that one. It’s always amazing watching actors perform my plays in a different language. They never change the setting though, so I'll usually hear them say ‘Ollerton’ in the middle of it, which is very surreal.

Till the Stars Come Down is showing at Nottingham Playhouse from 5-26 September 2026.

nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk