When the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher closed the Swan Hunter shipyard in Wallsend, the beating heart of Sting’s hometown was brutally ripped out. Grim, noisy and harsh, the shipbuilding industry was integral to the town’s identity and economic survival.

Tragically, unprotected workers were exposed to high levels of asbestos, extensively used in ship insulation. Sting’s character, Jackie White, the foreman, suffers from work-related mesothelioma. Despite the hazardous conditions, Karl Sydow’s detailed production communicates the workers’ dislocation when Wallsend’s primary trade is threatened.

The Last Ship. Photo © Mark Senior

Drawing on Sting’s own background and personal experience, The Last Ship is a paean to the savage impact of industrial decline on northern British communities, a theme canvassed in the show’s rousing We’ve Got Now’t Else and Shipyard. The resulting melodrama is deeply personal – uncomfortably so at times – and yet absorbing.

In developing the music, Sting – singer, songwriter and frontman for The Police – mined his 1991 album The Soul Cages. The show’s variable anthems, charting love, resilience and loss, interrogate his own confusion in wanting to...