Till the stars come down

Anna Sokolova
6 days ago
4 min read

KXT on Broadway, Sydney, 27 March – 11 April 2026

The review

This play was written in 2024 and set in the English Midlands, with circumstances and references specific to the UK. Yet it is easily transferable to any Western culture with its complex landscape of constant, reluctantly accepted changes in the life of society.

A working-class family, a wedding day for the youngest sister of three, Silvia (Imogen Sage @imogensage, the heart of this play). Hazel (Ainslie McGlynn @ainsliejosephine, a backbone of this work) is nervously getting everything ready - the event is big, but played on a budget. Everything - nails, hair, makeup are done at home. While Silvia is getting ready, everyone is steamed with excitement, and chats, nervous yells, and laughing fill the space where both Hazel's teenage daughters, one sweet and one bitter (excellent Amy Goedecke and Kira McLennan), and then the third sister, Maggie (Jane Angharad @jane_angharad, a nerve, an anxiety and uncertainty), and then Aunty Carol (Jo Briant @jo.briant) arrive, adding more to that hilarious chaos.

When finally all are ready, and the last nearly forgotten hair rollers are taken off, the entire party moves to a long-anticipated dinner. The wedding is organized in a local event place, where an atmosphere of celebration is created by a crowd and a good DJ, but not a fancy environment or posh and expensively arranged food.

The stage is covered by neatly nailed long wooden planks; the space feels like a summer veranda, especially being decorated with long strings of warm-yellow bulbs.

The long table, replacing the messy room, was taking the entire space, and, with the KXT arrangement, where the audience sits along opposite sides of the stage, the directing decision was brave. Everyone, the main couple and eight guests, was seated with their backs to the people watching, and that worked.

As much intimacy was brought to the face of the audience, while the eating (the show was very realistic) been - thankfully - hidden, but the conversation moved the flow.

The set changes are slow, quiet waiters fully set up and then remove the entire table, so the space is left empty as a bare arena for the humans to collide. The pauses might feel long, but those minutes, filled with gentle piano tunes, are needed to catch a breath.

A big gathering of extended family - where else, as night goes along and dancing and drinking slide into revealing collisions which were tactfully, or cowardly, or pragmatically (and soberly) hidden before.

There are several generations, each with its own level of experience. Older ones have more in the past. For younger ones, everything is either exciting or scary, and there is no scaffolding to be molded in, as the chaos grown-ups create around them. There are quite a handful of splendidly crafted performances. Aunty Carol is an impersonalisation of a punchline joke. She has a sharp comment, not necessarily appropriate, but always hitting right to the point. This woman is perfectly aware of her aging, her appearance, and she holds her place in life with great certainty. She is funny in her constant loud, sober, and then totally drunk appearances. She may not be really smart, but certainly wise with her life experiences.

Rejection of changes, deep from the guts refusal to accept immigrants as equals, and with that, no way to escape being tightened up in a frame of social arrangements - jobs, mortgages, responsibilities. That invisible cage, which limits the freedom of what to do. When a change might become a lifesaver, but one feels it is impossible to pursue.

The key strength of this work is that it allows people to feel what they feel without a magnifying glass looking at them, trying to find an explanation, justification, or judgment. Tears, overwhelming happiness, joy, fear, loss of purpose, rejection, fury, forgiveness, disgust, desire, desperation, screaming, withdrawal, or deep love - it's all in there, literally at the length of an arm. Those feelings are weaving like a fishnet made out of thin, but immensely strong rope. Once a knot is done, it is impossible to undo it, and these humans are getting engrossed in it more and more.

As Jane Angharad and Anthony Skuze say in their interviews, this play does echo the Chekov’s “Three sisters”. It is certainly so.

Hazel, Maggie and Silvia are connected by an unbreakable bond, even in the circumstances when staying together is unbearable. Their story is very funny at times, dramatic in its core, and painfully recognisable at the levels of both, big social and intimately personal.