How has it escaped being cancelled? The Lehman Trilogy, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, reviewed

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag, Park Hill, built by Sheffield council in the 1960s as a punishment for hard-up locals who couldn’t afford to buy a house. The show is a propaganda effort on behalf of bossy, big-state, high-tax Labour authorities so the smiling residents of the brutalist eyesore keep telling us how much they love their multistorey dungeon. ‘You can see the whole city from up here,’ say the characters, as if no Sheffield resident had ever mounted any of the bluffs or heights that surround the area. The script is honest enough to admit that Park Hill’s secondary purpose is to reduce the city’s population by encouraging depressives to jump from its upper levels. That policy works well, we’re assured.

The script, by Chris Bush, follows three families who occupy the high-rise rabbit hutch over a period of six decades. First, a sex-mad Yorkshire couple who are desperate to have kids. Next, a trio of shrieking Liberian refugees. Finally, an unstable Scottish lesbian who wants to win back her gin-soaked girlfriend. Lovely people, of course, but there’s no reason why London play-goers should give a hoot about any of them. The show belongs up there, not here.

One of the storylines feels like a parody. A black teenage girl is rescued from a racist murder gang by a young white communist who quotes Blake and makes speeches in support of public sector strikes (keenly applauded by the NT crowd). The three sets of flat-dwellers are on stage most of the time, often sitting adjacently at the kitchen table, so it’s hard to know who to look at or where to focus your attention. The scenes are broken up with dull bursts of music thumped out by a crew of instrumentalists and singers on stage.