REVIEW: Living at The Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield

Fast forward six years, and – via Call the Midwife, the Edinburgh Fringe, and plaudits that have her tipped as the next Victoria Wood – Abby Vicky-Russell is making her Crucible debut on the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse stage, as one of the stars of Living, an epic play set in Sheffield spanning more than 30 characters and 55 years.

Probably those six years feel like the blink of an eye, and a lifetime all at once, to Abby – who, alongside a breathtaking turn from Life On Mars actress Liz White as her mum Cathy, is the standout star of this three-hour play of ambitious scope.

After all, as the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short – which sums up the ground that Living covers as it follows the relentless march of time in one family’s lives, contained mostly inside the prism (prison?) of the living room of one house, in the city suburb of Burngreave, from 1969 through to 2024.

All the happy, sad, comic, tragic twists and turns of anyone’s uniquely ordinary life are here, against the backdrop of working-class Sheffield, with some major global events thrown in along the way.

Written in 2017 by Sheffield playwright Leo Butler, but only now brought to the stage by Sheffield Theatres’ new artistic director Elizabeth Newman, Living explores plenty of hometown parallels from Butler’s own upbringing.

Clearly a very personal creation, it’s life and love, laughter and loss, punctuated by politics, pop music – and plenty of chippy teas.

Cathy is married to Brian, and their lives together begin as another ends, with the moon landings crackling from the black and white TV and Tony Capstick spinning the sounds of their early years on a radio the last tenant left behind.

With the aid of a giant calendar projected onto the walls, and with the help of clever costume changes and direction, we rattle through the decades – though the pacing of the play stalls in the over-long final segment.

Described in the programme as a ‘state of the nation’ play, there are obvious comparisons to be made between Living and the stellar Standing at the Sky’s Edge – which begins in 1961 and tells the story of three families over 60 years living in Park Hill.

But if Standing at the Sky’s Edge was a love letter to Sheffield, Living feels sometimes like a shopping list.

People and place names are ticked off in the script as a checklist reliant on an audience that will know them: Atkinson’s, the Wicker, Sheaf Market, Pond Street, Fitzalan Square, th’Ole in’t Road, Kelvin Flats, Norton College and the Blue Moon Cafe. How most of these references would translate to any theatre beyond Tudor Square is difficult to imagine.

World events are chronicled chronologically too: decimalisation, feminism, capitalism, Live Aid, Euro 96, New Labour, the millennium, Covid and mobile phones.

We all remember them, of course. But beyond a nostalgic trip through time, the cultural references can feel clunky, and some conversations unlikely.

Absolutely Cathy, Brian and their friends might have been politically-engaged, as one year segues into another, their marriage evolves and their children grow, and they grapple with jobs, health, and how to work the video recorder.

Whether their lives would have been characterised by quite so much political and patriarchal dissection, however – and why these snapshots from a life, and not others – sometimes feels forced.

But Liz White is astonishing as matriarch Cathy, and the enormous amount of learned dialogue for the cast of eight to master is a feat of endurance in itself.

White’s portrayal of Cathy’s gradual decline unfolds with unsettling realism, and is delivered with sensitivity and control.

For anyone who has lived through the unfathomable descent into decrepitude of a once formidable parent, her second act performance is a raw and all-too-real watch.

• Living is The Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse until Saturday, April 4.