Weddings and funerals are drama’s great pressure cookers: ceremonies designed to smooth things over that instead force everything unsaid into the open.

In British writer Beth Steel’s ferociously entertaining play, a wedding does double duty as a state-of-the-nation address. Set in a former mining town (Mansfield) still scarred by the pit closures of the 1980s, it uses the marriage of a local girl to a Polish migrant to prise open the fault lines of post-industrial Britain – the feelings of grievance that fed Brexit and continue to be amplified by the likes of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and the flag-hoisting Operation Raise the Colours movement.

The couple at the centre are Sylvia, the youngest of three sisters, and Marek, a self-made migrant whose success rankles. In towns like this, the past isn’t past: it sits in the landscape and in the family. Sylvia’s uncle Pete, a former miner, hasn’t spoken to her father Tony for 40 years, their feud calcified since a Miners’ Strike picket line. Steel tracks the action from the whirl of wedding-day “women’s business” to a reception that curdles spectacularly, as resentments boil over and land the groom in A&E.

Jo Briant, Imogen Sage and Zoran Jevtic in Till the Stars Come Down. Photo © Braiden Toko

Director Anthony Skuse expertly shapes a vivid ensemble work. The noisy choreography of preparation and celebration is deftly controlled; at its best, the production makes the audience feel like guests eavesdropping on truths that shouldn’t be spoken aloud.

Among the standouts, Imogen Sage brings a tremulous edge to Sylvia; Ainslie McGlynn’s Hazel bristles with hostility and unease; Jane Angharad gives the flighty Maggie a dangerous charm. Jo Briant is a comic force as Carol, the sixty-something determined to party like a teenager and speak her truth.

Peter Eyers and Brendan Mikes ground the long-running feud between brothers, while James Smithers (also the set designer) lends a faintly Chekhovian wistfulness to John, Hazel’s unemployed, romantically distracted husband. Zoran Jevtic does admirable work fleshing out the underwritten Marek.

Imogen Sage, Jane Angharad and Ainslie McGlynn in Till the Stars Come Down. Photo © Braiden Toko

Design elements pull their weight: lighting by Topaz Marlay-Cole and music and sound by Layla Phillips shape the evening’s rhythm with precision, carrying us from giddy anticipation to something much darker.

If Steel occasionally paints in bold strokes, it’s because she’s after a bigger picture: how private wounds metastasise into public rancour. By the time the confetti settles, the play has turned a wedding into a reckoning – messy, bruising and uncomfortably close to home.

Till the Stars Come Down plays at KXT on Broadway until 11 April.