Music and Lyrics: Sting
Book: Barney Norris
Director: Leo Warner
12 years after it foundered on Broadway, and after considerable tinkering, Sting’s deeply personal shipyard musical about the collapse of the industry in his native Tyneside finally sails into London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with a new book by Barney Norris. Unfortunately, at almost three hours in length, The Last Ship is laden with excess cargo.
The Police star plays Jackie White, a dying foreman of a Wallsend shipyard, threatened with closure by caricatured Thatcherite ministers (one protest placard reads: ‘Cold Steel for Iron Lady’). Billy Thompson (played by Joe Caffrey) calls a strike. Workers and women unite, resolving to launch the vessel, christened the ‘Utopia’, themselves.
Leo Warner’s staging initially promises extravagance, its giant projection of the ship’s hull hanging over the cast. Alongside a vast metal slab working as ship part, ceiling and stage, it partly compensates for the minimal choreography and stiffness of the ensemble below. Scaffolding and showers of sparks complete an imposing picture, but the screen remains static for long enough that even the grandeur begins to rust.
A greater problem is how tremendously seriously The Last Ship takes itself while providing little reason to care. Its argument is established early: the yard is threatened, a community destroyed. Yet, a quarter of an hour into Act Two, one stops wondering what will happen and starts wondering when. Little develops beyond the insistence that, yes, the ship must be launched.
The price of dramatic stagnation is paid as Sting’s Jackie White, mid-song, hand on heart, flops dead in a ceremony reminiscent of the Frog King in Shrek the Third. In what is meant to be an emotional peak, concealed giggles populate the audience, becoming harder to suppress when a projected ghost of Sting, with all the solemnity of the orchestrated soundtrack, strolls into the wings.
Sting himself plays Jackie straight, Geordie accent intact. He is celebrated as he takes the stage, yet it is Declan Bennett’s Gideon, home after 17 years, and Frances McNamee’s Meg, who command this production. McNamee’s accent holds through every number, while Bennett’s slips its moorings. Although his When We Dance with Hannah Richardson’s Ellen is the tenderest moment of the night.
Indeed, it is largely the women keeping this ship afloat. Jackie Morrison’s Peggy stamps out the torpid pace with Show Some Respect, one of the few tunes that sticks, marching across the stage to take the helm, steering The Last Ship back on course.
Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong’s Baroness Tynedale is a pantomime Tory but has an authority the heroes lack; her Ship Of State lands well. Against the sanctimony and self-importance surrounding Sting’s… sorry, Jackie’s crusade, this villain becomes easier to root for. One only wishes she would shut down a few of the songs instead of the yard.
Too many of the numbers run aground, dull and ending without impact. Norris, like Baroness Tynedale, might have been more brutal in trimming the score that too rarely echoes Sting’s hit appeal or the extravagance of musical theatre.
The Last Ship has the rigging of a seaworthy musical, but it inevitably sinks under an hour of dead weight, and perhaps too many yes-men.
Runs until 3 October 2026
