I went to The Last Ship expecting Sting to be the main attraction. I wasn’t expecting to come away quite so enthusiastic about a giant projected ship. But while there are some fabulous performances in this musical, it was the design that had me completely captivated. The story, unfortunately, had rather less of a hold on me.

At the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Sting’s musical takes us to Wallsend, the shipbuilding town near Newcastle where he grew up. With music and lyrics by Sting, and a new book by Barney Norris, it follows a community facing the closure of the shipyard around which their lives have been built. Faced with losing their livelihoods, the workers decide to fight back and finish one last ship.

Into all this comes Gideon, played by Declan Bennett, returning after years away and hoping to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, Meg (Frances McNamee). Except Meg has a pub to run, a daughter to raise, and very little interest in welcoming back the man who left her. Meanwhile, shipyard foreman Jackie White, played by Sting, has problems of his own, both personal and work related, as the government are shutting down the shipyard.

There is plenty here that should move me. A community fighting for its future, old relationships with unfinished business, people trying to hold on to the things that give their lives meaning. The trouble is that almost every storyline feels familiar, and far too often I could see exactly where it was going.

We’ve had the brilliant Pride, about the alliance between lesbian and gay activists and striking miners, and Made in Dagenham, about the Ford women’s fight for equal pay. These are different stories, of course, but they show how compelling a musical about working people standing together can be. Familiar territory isn’t automatically a problem. You just need to care enough about the people in it, and here I struggled.

Early on, Jackie’s wife Peggy, played superbly by Jackie Morrison, asks him about seeing the doctor. It doesn’t take much to make a fairly confident guess at where that storyline is heading. The same goes for much of Gideon and Meg’s relationship. There is one wonderful surprise in the second half that briefly made me sit up and think, oh, that’s brilliant – I won’t spoil it – but I wanted more of that feeling, rather than so much time waiting for the show to arrive somewhere I’d already seen coming a mile off.

None of this is down to a lack of talent on stage. Sting opens the show singing from a raised platform, and he sounds great. In fact, one of my early notes reads ‘great Stinging’, which I apparently thought was hilarious at the time. He’s good as Jackie, too, and there’s something lovely about seeing him perform in a musical so closely connected to where he comes from.

Unfortunately, that opening also introduced a problem that kept cropping up throughout the evening: I couldn’t always understand what was being sung. The voices sounded wonderful, but the lyrics were often muddy. I was in row E of the stalls, and even from there I lost far too many words. When songs are doing so much of the storytelling, sound really matters.

Bennett has a brilliant voice as Gideon, and I was particularly happy to see Frances McNamee as Meg. I absolutely loved her in Ballad Lines, my favourite show that I’ve ever reviewed, and she’s very good here. I just wished her character’s story had given me more to discover.

Some of my favourite scenes were between Meg and her daughter Ellen, played by Hannah Richardson. Their mother-and-daughter chemistry is wonderful, and their songs together are a real highlight. Richardson has a hell of a voice. Even when I couldn’t make out every lyric, there was no missing the quality of the singing.

Adam Strong also deserves a mention as Davey, particularly for his song ‘Hadaway’. And the ensemble is fabulous. The scenes where the full company fills the stage are among the strongest in the show, giving this community the scale and collective force it needs. The title song, ‘The Last Ship’, is a stomping, thumping highlight, and those big ensemble moments gave me glimpses of the musical I wanted the whole evening to be.

Lejaun Sheppard makes an interesting presence as the Wallsend Ferryman, a spectral figure hovering around the action. I liked the character and the slightly otherworldly element he brings, although his presence does little to make Jackie’s storyline less obvious.

But the real star of the evening was the design.

For much of the show, an enormous ship towers over the stage. It is the subject of arguments and uncertainty, the thing these people are fighting to finish, and there is absolutely no chance of forgetting it is there. It looks vast enough to dwarf the lives being played out beneath it.

Jenny Melville’s set, Adam Bassett’s lighting, Benjamin Pearcy’s video design, and Matt Taylor’s animation work together so beautifully that I kept questioning what I was looking at. Initially, I thought I could clearly see that the ship was a two-dimensional image. Then the lighting would change, a shadow would fall, and I’d find myself wondering again.

It reminded me of ABBA Voyage, where the lighting and the images combine so convincingly that knowing how something works doesn’t stop you believing the illusion. Here, the physical shipyard scaffolding sits in front of the projected ship, with huge gates coming across when required, and it all feels part of the same space.

The changing weather is beautifully realised, and I was particularly fascinated by the welding. Sparks are incorporated into the video so cleverly that the work appears to be happening right there on the ship. It’s a small detail within an enormous picture, but those details make the whole thing convincing.

At times, I was so busy admiring the set that it distracted me from the actors. That says a lot about how good the design is, but it also says something about how little some of the drama was holding my attention.

When the big emotional moments arrived, I wasn’t where the show needed me to be. In one scene, Adrian – played by Duane Gooden – the character with a fondness for quoting the classics, breaks down in tears. I could see the grief on stage, but I wasn’t feeling it myself. I am not a difficult person to make cry at the theatre, I love being moved by a musical. I wanted to care about these people, and I was frustrated that, despite the performances, I often didn’t.

There are songs I thoroughly enjoyed, voices I could happily listen to all evening, and a production design that is worth celebrating. There are also stretches where the music didn’t excite me and the story felt too predictable to pull me back in.

I so wanted to love The Last Ship. In the end, I simply liked it. Judging by the reception, plenty of people had come to see Sting and went away very happy. I enjoyed seeing him too. I just wanted to leave caring as much about the characters as I did about how they’d built that incredible ship.

The Last Ship is playing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until 3 October 2026.

Book your tickets at thelastship-musical.com

Words by Nick Barr

Photography by Nienke de Groot