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.