The notices are in for The Last Ship, Sting’s musical about a Wallsend shipyard facing closure, which has reached the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for a run of barely a fortnight at the end of a world tour. The critics part company almost exactly where the show does. On the design they are close to unanimous: 59 Studio’s projected hull, with video by Benjamin Pearcy and animation by Matt Taylor, is called the best thing on the stage by warm and cool reviewers alike. On Barney Norris’s book — the fourth the show has had — they are not: several find the strands slow to converge and the plotting hard to credit. Frances McNamee draws praise almost everywhere, Sting’s own performance divides them, and the brevity of the run is the one thing nobody can explain.
The verdict: twenty-seven reviews in so far — one five-star notice, five four-star, twelve three-star, one at two and a half, four at two and one at one and a half, with two outlets publishing no rating at all and The Times’s rating behind its paywall. Among the twenty-four that carry a score the average is 3.0 out of 5, and the one point on which they nearly all agree is that 59 Studio’s projected ship is the finest thing in the building.
What are critics saying about The Last Ship?
West End Best Friend
Reviewer: Brian Penn
“In many ways, it has a strong association with Billy Elliot which uses the miner’s strike as a back drop to the primary story. The difference here is that The Last Ship puts the industrial landscape of 80s Britain front and centre, with a story that portrays a whole community and not just individuals. The West End badly needs shows like this to maintain a degree of variety. This particular run is painfully short, and we can only hope it comes back soon for a much longer stint.”
Theatre Weekly
“Visually stunning, musically rich and anchored by a palpable sense of community”
Reviewer: Greg Stewart
“And shine they do. The company creates a genuinely believable community, populated by recognisable individuals rather than a sea of anonymous workers. Sting himself delivers an excellent performance as ailing Jackie White, who has long put the shipyard before his own health. Any concerns that audiences might simply see a global music icon on stage quickly disappear. Instead, he inhabits the role with sincerity and conviction. Declan Bennett brings complexity to Gideon’s conflicted relationship with his hometown, while Frances McNamee is thoroughly convincing as Meg. Hannah Richardson nearly stops the show entirely with a stirring late Act Two number that is amongst the evening’s highlights.”
London Box Office
Reviewer: Stuart King
“Despite a further fourteen players coming and going for the larger company numbers, it is Sting’s ballads and intricately penned duets which catch the ear and add poignancy to the otherwise stoic characters. However, for all the beautiful onstage timbres (most notably delivered by Bennett and McNamee), the true star of the evening is the magnificent and omnipresent projection of the huge ship’s dry-docked stern. It constantly changes as the light moves and workers attend the steel plates with arc-welders or move up and down before its titanic façade on various lifted and lowered steel girders. From a directorial perspective, it has the effect of focusing (or limiting?) the action, requiring everyone to play downstage centre but it also plays to the no-nonsense light and dark themes of good and bad, right and wrong, guilt and contrition, which flow through the simple but engaging narrative thread.”
The Spy in the Stalls
Reviewer: Jonathan Evans
“The Last Ship” makes for a long evening, yet it is enthralling throughout. There are a lot of songs in the show, but no weak number. I had in mind to highlight a few, but my own category started to include almost the entire set list. The eclecticism is subtle, lending a consistency that allows heartfelt ballads to merge seamlessly with chorales, or a spritely bossa nova, and many a soul-stirring duet. The story might be nothing new or groundbreaking, but the staging is ground shaking. Many a dropped jaw will be picked up from the floor by the ushers after the show’s dramatic and panoramic climax. “The Last Ship”, ironically, looks set to have many, many voyages ahead.
LouReviews
Reviewer: Louise Penn
“In the person of the Wallsend Ferryman (played by Shaggy at our performance), a watchful mortality spreads across the production. He is the redeeming angel and commentator on a collapsing way of life. Drawing on this, a moment where all the women appear before the locked gates of the shipyard to challenge authority is a powerful testament to the close community of our shared industrial past.”
London Unattached
Reviewer: Madeleine Morrow
“While The Last Ship, that runs to just under three hours with an interval feels lengthy, there are some standout sequences, especially The Last Ship which brings the first half to a rousing finale. Sting himself leaves much of the vocal work to his younger cast members, but there were some lovely duets with Morrison. Morrison, herself, comes into her own not only in the narrative, but finds her strongest singing voice in the second half. Similarly Richardson as the teenage daughter, whose gutsy rendition of a reworked All This Time is one of the highlights of the show.”
WhatsOnStage
“Sting in choppy waters in the West End”
Reviewer: Alex Wood
“One great pitfall of Leo Warner’s staging is that so much of the action is placed upstage, feeling intrinsically distant from the audience and sapping the show of urgency and drive – especially as the three different plot strands diverge for slightly too long. Sting’s music is serviceable – a couple of solid tunes liven up proceedings in act two, but the first half is slower to navigate and stodgy. There are some clunky moments – a whole spiel about trickle-down economics (aside from the relatively fun pun) is overwrought, though well-performed by Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong.”
Time Out
“A plot that lurches from tender social realism to pure garbage”
Reviewer: Andrzej Lukowski
“The Last Ship is an awesome spectacle and a heartfelt one too. It is a personal project, which gives it integrity. Cutting-edge projectionists 59 Productions are an inspired choice. Shaggy was fun. But after 13 years and three incarnations, is there really a classic musical waiting to be coaxed out? I suspect it’s too late to turn that ship around.”
LondonTheatre.co.uk
“Sting’s shipyard musical is deeply heartfelt”
Reviewer: Theo Bosanquet
“Leo Warner's production at the cavernous Theatre Royal Drury Lane plays out against an expansive projected backdrop from video designer Benjamin Pearcy (nicely augmented by set designer Jenny Melville's ladders and girders), which features the towering hull of the Utopia. It's an awesome, ghostly presence that comes suddenly to life in the closing moments, which are a defiant hymn to the power of community. Like the dockyards it celebrates, The Last Ship may not be the most efficient of operations, but there's no doubting the heart behind it.”
BroadwayWorld UK
“Sting has still got it - but the book still has its problems too”
Reviewer: Gary Naylor
“Neither of them can compete with Studio 59’s spectacular set, evoking those black and white photographs of post-war Wallsend in excelsis, its gigantic hulls towering over the terraced streets like a somnolent Godzilla. There’s also more than a touch of Stanley Spencer’s paintings of the Glasgow yards, welders and riveters working in an infernal domain of sparks and fumes in the marvellous video projections.”
LondonTheatre1
“Heartfelt and quirky in equal measure, but the holes in the plot haven’t quite been plugged yet”
Reviewer: Chris Omaweng
“In the first half, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the show needed more ‘oomph’, and while some of it arrived in the second half, it was occasionally jarring, especially when there was a song-and-dance against the backdrop of a tragedy. These were ridiculously joyful characters at the end of the show, given they had (the show’s title is a giveaway) lost their livelihoods. Still, as a quote attributed to Mark Twain puts it, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.”
All That Dazzles
“Sting’s musical docks in the West End for the first time in a slightly turbulent but ultimately enjoyable voyage”
Reviewer: Daz Gale
“Perhaps the biggest strength in this production of The Last Ship is in its stunning and striking visuals. Making full use of the sprawling stage at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the production continually impresses with 59 Studio’s design and Jenny Melville’s set design bursting to life through some of the best video design I have ever seen, courtesy of Benjamin Pearcy. Reminiscent of the immersive exhibitions that are becoming a fixture in London such as Pompeii or, for an obvious comparison, Titanic, these videos are anything but a disaster with a particularly thrilling end leaving my jaw wide open. Where the previous resident of Theatre Royal Drury Lane didn’t quite make use of the huge space available to it, The Last Ship has no such problem, utilising every inch of that cavernous stage, high and wide in a production that is breathtakingly beautiful to see.”
Theatre and Tonic
Reviewer: Philip
“This is an epic in every sense of the word; grand, bold and imposing, appropriately befitting the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the scale of the story being told. Yet the staging does not always match that ambition. The direction can feel surprisingly static, with much of the action positioned far upstage. On a stage as vast as Drury Lane’s, this sometimes creates a sense of distance between the audience and the community we are supposed to feel so intimately connected to.”
Plays International
Reviewer: Franco Milazzo
“The heartfelt acting among a capable cast is let down both the songbook and the script. Until the last 15 minutes, neither go out of their way to impress. There are very good reasons why Sting’s records with the Police are of a different class to anything on the 15 albums he has released since he went solo. Likewise, the storyline talks of anger towards the Conservative government over the loss of their livelihoods but that sentiment comes across as lukewarm at best.”
“That final quarter of an hour, though, is something else. There’s loss, there’s victory, and there’s a number you can hum on the way out. The Last Ship leaves it to the end to demonstrate just why it has continued sailing on all these years.”
Adventures in Theatreland
Reviewer: Megan O’Neill
“Overall, this musical feels underdeveloped. There are aspects that have so much promise, but they are overshadowed by misguided elements which are hollow and underestimate the intellect of the audience. Hopefully, the creative team learn from this iteration and really look at identifying and exploring the true anchor of the musical.”
Read Megan O’Neill’s full review at Adventures in Theatreland
West End Wilma
“The Last Ship isn’t bad. It is clearly a story worth telling, with a wonderful cast who can tell it but three hours is a long time to spend looking for the story, even with Sting on stage.”
“But for a chance to see him live, in one of London’s most extraordinary theatres, it was an enjoyable evening. Just not quite the triumphant West End premiere this ship deserved. Perhaps it is time to stop trying to revive a ship that has already set sail.”
The Reviews Hub
Reviewer: Harry Mayes
“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 Standard
“Sting’s musical is as solemn and ponderous as a tanker”
Reviewer: Nick Curtis
“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.”
Everything Theatre
“Sting’s The Last Ship sails into Drury Lane with plenty of noise, spectacle and shouting, but little heart or humour”
Reviewer: Alan Fitter
“As the story unfolds, we meet a succession of mostly two-dimensional, clichéd characters working their way through a ludicrous plot. There’s the love interest, part of a couple who haven’t seen each other for sixteen years, with the added complication that he doesn’t know he has a teenage daughter. There’s the union official who shouts at everyone, the town drunk who finds redemption, and the government official, Baroness Tynedale, who’s sent to close the shipyard, acting as a pseudo Margaret Thatcher in her trademark blue suit (this is the mid-eighties after all).”
Production photographs by Nienke de Groot.
Musical Theatre Review
“But when a piece of virtual set is the best thing about a show, you know there’s something wrong. The Last Ship wants to be a tribute to the working classes of Wallsend and places like it, left behind as British industry changed in the 1980s. Instead, it reduces them to little people, stuck in front of a screen that is far more interesting than the musical beneath it.”
A Young(ish) Perspective
“The Last Ship has plenty of effort and a couple of fun moments, but bad pacing and too many bloated songs keep it stuck in port.”
Reviewer: Mark Lloyd
“The highlight of the night comes from Frances McNamee, who turns “If You Ever See Me Talking To A Sailor” into an absolute standout. She sings it brilliantly and brings some much-needed fun to the stage. That said, its tango style feels completely out of place against the rest of the music, much like another confusing number best described as a funeral polka. Both are enjoyable enough in isolation, but they end up feeling like weird detours from a generally uninspiring score. Sting is, of course, a multi-Grammy winner and an undeniably skilled songwriter, but the sheer volume of uneventful numbers drags the whole evening down.”
First Night Magazine
“Sting’s hulk of a musical sinks on its West End maiden voyage”
Reviewer: Guillermo Názara
“Sting’s performance is underwhelming. So is Shaggy’s, whose ethereal role as the Wallsend Ferryman is awfully underwritten and feels rather unnecessary. Sting’s pitch shortcomings are too frequent and noticeable, just like his inability to act convincingly. In that regard, Frances McNamee delivers a more competent portrayal, but her vocals are far from flawless — too much sweeping and not the best placement in several segments.”
British Theatre Guide
Reviewer: Sandra Giorgetti
“The opening is a winner with a towering set design (largely projected but nonetheless impactful for that) matched by an industrial cacophony from which the orchestra’s playing emerges. The first act is then carried by expectation, anthemic settings and outstanding vocals especially from Frances McNamee’s charismatic Meg, but what makes it charmingly unhurried before the interval proves unsustainable, and it becomes listlessly slow after it.”
Read Sandra Giorgetti’s full review at British Theatre Guide
Theatre Vibe
Reviewer: Lizzie Loveridge
“The musical has almost all new songs but at 25 separate tunes, there is little to remember on first hearing. Ideally one should be familiar with the album to get the most out of this musical or some tunes could have been repeated in the manner of Les Miserables so they have stuck by the end of the first showing. It is all very well sung but with it also only running until 3rd October, there is something fleeting and transitory about it.”
“This is such a shame because the shipyard set along with video and projection are some of the best staging I have ever seen. There is scaffolding and gantries, steel surrounds and fencing closing off the one last ship named the Utopia. At the height of the work we see the welding works as sparks and bursts of light with the full impact of industrialised engineering sound. The hull of the ship itself is magnificent and the lighting changed for this blue lit ship to become flaming red.”
Also reviewed by: The Stage (Sam Marlowe, three stars, “Tasteful and intelligent”), The Telegraph (Dominic Cavendish, three stars, “Sting’s musical has a crushing sense of its own importance”) and The Times (“Sting and his joyful songs save this dockyard musical”), whose reviews sit behind paywalls. The Stage and Telegraph ratings were read first-hand and are counted in the average above; The Times shows neither a rating nor a critic’s name outside its paywall.
For more from the same stage, read our roundup of Still Life at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and our earlier report on the full casting of this production.
The Last Ship is booking at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until Saturday 3 October 2026.
