The Last Ship: Sting's musical is as solemn and ponderous as a tanker

As solemn and ponderous as a tanker, Sting’s musical about industrial decline in the north-east finally heaves into the West End, albeit for just 16 (surely commercially unviable) performances. This has been a passion project of the singer-songwriter for over 15 years, a salute to the eviscerated Tyneside shipbuilding communities he escaped, but it’s far from riveting.

The folk-inflected score is pretty good, as you’d expect from such an accomplished musical storyteller, but overstuffed with 27 numbers, including reprises. The projected image of a massive ship’s hull dominating the stage underlines the over-use of seagoing metaphors in the lyrics. The plot, which welds a prodigal love story to an up-the-workers fantasy of anti-capitalist defiance, is insultingly lame. The acting in Leo Warner’s production is unsubtle, to say the least.

Sting himself stars as Jackie, a noble shipyard foreman stricken with lung cancer, and the show clocks in at a tantric three hours as we wait for his much-flagged, symbolic demise. Oh Sting, where is thy death, I wondered, glancing again at my watch.

More bafflingly, reggae star Shaggy played a figure equivalent to Charon, the ferryman to the underworld in Greek myth, for the first preview and opening night. For the rest of the run it isn’t him: Lejaun Sheppard takes over the role.

There are a couple of other odd characters: a drunk and his poetry-spouting buddy, there to symbolise the hardship and the nobility of hot, heavy labour. All the women are tough and stoical. There’s also a weird throwback to the Catholicism of Sting’s upbringing, with the workers likened to Jesus.

Sting and the ensemble of The Last Ship

Nienke de Groot

Anyway: in a 1970s-set preamble we see motherless Gideon (Declan Bennett) flee the home of his hard-drinking, shipbuilder father to enlist in the Navy. Fast-forward 17 years and he returns after his dad’s death, just as a stock-villain Tory baroness announces that the state-owned shipyard is to be closed. There is another surprise waiting for him: a stroppy daughter, Ellen (Hannah Richardson), with the teenage sweetheart, Meg (Frances McNamee), who he abandoned.

Meg has been pursued in the intervening years by Freddy (Matt Beveridge), the manager of the yard his family once owned, who seems happy with a sexless relationship (“a practical arrangement,” he trills). Freddy plans to take the yard back into private hands – his own – but with a 70% reduction in the labour force.

There’s talk of industrial action. Then Jackie, mystifyingly, suggests the men break into the site to finish and launch the yard’s much delayed last ship, cumbersomely named the Utopia. Quite what this futile gesture is supposed to achieve isn’t clear. It’s not just the economics of a 16-date run that don’t add up here.

Many of the songs have a certain majesty, and a resonant sense of working-class community and pride, not least because they are belted out by an absolutely enormous ensemble: at one point I counted 31 people on stage, not including the leads. The duets and ballads, however, tend towards the irredeemably mawkish.

Sting’s own voice has settled at a gruff register, remote from the fluting stylings of previous decades. The standout performer here is McNamee as Meg, who delivers the tango-style number If You Ever See Me Talking to a Sailor with force and panache.

The main problem here is the book, now on its fourth writer. Barney Norris, whose own plays and novels are rich and delicate, here reworks a previous version by Lorne Campbell, based on the original by John Logan and Brian Yorkey. But the story remains a mess of cliches, about leaving places and coming back, capitalism versus community.

You wonder how easy it was for Norris, or Leo Warner (whose company 59 studio is credited with co-direction, set and video design) to gainsay this show’s powerful creator and star. The Last Ship is earnest and well-meaning with some good songs, but it simply doesn’t float.