Beth Steel’s new play is set in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire in the present day at a wedding.  Its theme is a continuation of the Sheffield set The Full Monty, and for the BBC, James Graham’s Sherwood where we look at male unemployment after the steel industry and pit closures of the 1980s and 1990s.  The uncle of the bride Pete (Philip Whitchurch) gives an emotional litany of these closed pits, like the list of villages in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, each one a community that has lost employment and its heart and each loss a suppurating wound.

This bitter pathos comes in the middle of the soap opera that is the women gossiping and preparing for the wedding, nails, hair, clothes, hats and make up.  The bride Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) worries about her hair and hasn’t tried on her dress recently thinking it is bad luck.  It is bad luck not to have tried it on because it gapes two inches at the zip.  “Sew her into it!” I thought but they insisted instead they find her dead mother’s wedding dress.  Sylvia is the last to get married of her three sisters.