The Last Ship – Theatre Royal Drury Lane

An epic spectacle built to impress.

There is something immediately epic about The Last Ship. Sting’s deeply personal musical has sailed into the Theatre Royal Drury Lane as part of its 2026 international tour, and this is a production with scale, ambition and an extraordinary visual identity. Inspired by Sting’s childhood in the North East shipbuilding town of Wallsend, it tells of a community facing the closure of the shipyard that has provided not only employment but an identity and way of life for generations. Sting himself takes on the role of shipyard foreman Jackie White in this newly reimagined version, featuring a new book by Barney Norris and direction by Leo Warner.

But the real star of the show is the ship itself: Utopia.

Filling virtually the entire rear wall of the enormous Drury Lane stage, it is quite breathtaking. The physical scenery blends so seamlessly with Benjamin Pearcy’s video design and Matt Taylor’s animation that, when the production opened, I genuinely wasn’t sure what was a physical set piece and what was being created digitally. Ladders and structures on stage merge into the vast image of the ship sitting in dry dock behind them, giving the whole production an extraordinary sense of scale.

At first, it seems slightly strange that Utopia remains visible as we move away from the shipyard. In one scene we find ourselves on a street, with the enormous vessel still looming behind it. Yet it soon becomes apparent that this is precisely the point. The ship is everywhere because the shipyard is everywhere in these people’s lives. It is their livelihood, their history and part of their identity.

One particularly beautiful moment comes in the church, where stained-glass windows frame the stage and the lighting falling across the front of Utopia creates the image of a crucifix. It is a wonderfully composed stage picture and one of several moments when the technical elements combine to produce something quite special.

Leo Warner and his creative team have created a production that often feels genuinely cinematic. The screens glitched once at the performance I attended, but that did little to diminish the overall achievement. Utopia is not merely scenery; it becomes another character in the musical.

There is also something refreshing about hearing a musical score that gives so much prominence to deeper male voices. Sting’s music feels rooted in the world these characters inhabit, and when the company comes together there is real power in the sound. The moments of solidarity are particularly heartfelt, capturing the sense of a community refusing simply to disappear.

Sting has a strong presence as Jackie White with a salt-of-the-earth quality . Performing in his own North East accent, there is an authenticity to his connection with the material that would be difficult to manufacture. This is, after all, a world drawn from the one in which he grew up, and The Last Ship feels very much like a love letter to the people and industry that surrounded him.

Joe Caffrey is brilliant as union representative Billy Thompson. He looks and feels completely at home in the role – so much so that he reminded me of most of the union reps I have met. There is an grounded quality to the performance that perfectly suits the world of the piece.

It is when we move from the production itself to the storytelling that The Last Ship becomes less assured.

The story is gravely deep, which is not necessarily a criticism, not every musical needs to be sunshine and sequins, but I did find myself wanting a little more lift and joy amongst the darkness. There are inevitable comparisons to productions such as Billy Elliot and The Boys from the Blackstuff, with another Northern community confronting redundancy, industrial decline and union action. Yet those stories perhaps give us a clearer understanding of exactly what everyone is fighting for.

Here, some important plot points remain frustratingly unclear.

The programme contains considerable historical context about the decline of British shipbuilding and the industrial disputes surrounding it. Reading it afterwards helped enormously, but a musical should ideally communicate that information without requiring its audience to consult supporting material.

The workers appear to have the possibility of a private buyout but reject the prospect of a businessman becoming wealthy from their labour, instead placing their hopes in government work. They then race to complete Utopia, a ship we have already been told is behind schedule. They succeed, but I was left assuming they still lost their jobs.

Consequently, what should perhaps feel like a fight for survival sometimes feels more like a farewell. That is emotionally effective in its own way, but it also reduces some of the dramatic jeopardy.

There are other strands that could carry greater weight. One character’s history in the armed forces appears to become important to the workers’ plan, yet I never fully understood why. Likewise, the women’s protest offers the opportunity to explore another side of this community’s struggle, but arrives and disappears surprisingly quickly. I wanted it to have more impact.

Shaggy’s appearance as the Wallsend Ferryman is another intriguing but slightly puzzling element. The character seems to sit somewhere between a real person, narrator with few lines and almost ethereal presence without quite settling into any of them. Shaggy himself has undeniable charisma and stage presence, but the performance felt around 80% Shaggy and 20% character. That isn’t necessarily a criticism of him as a performer; rather, his distinctive persona feels slightly disconnected from the gritty Northern realism surrounding him. Shaggy is appearing only briefly in the London run, with Lejaun Sheppard also playing the Ferryman.

There are moments when the music and dialogue feel similarly disconnected. Rather than the dialogue naturally carrying us into a song, several sequences follow a noticeable pattern: the dialogue stops, the music begins and then the singing starts. You can almost feel yourself waiting for the song to arrive. Greater fluidity between those elements would help the piece enormously.

At the performance I attended, the sound mix also occasionally worked against the score. Those wonderful deep voices sometimes became lost within the orchestration, making lyrics difficult to understand. In a story that already asks its audience to follow a relatively complex industrial dispute, losing words compounds the problem.

There are some curious staging decisions too. At one point, the curtain comes down and the cast perform against a black background. I assumed this was disguising a substantial scene change, yet when it rose again very little seemed to have altered. In a production otherwise so inventive in its use of technology, it is an unexpectedly conventional moment.

Yet none of these reservations undo what The Last Ship achieves when all of its elements come together.

At its heart, this is not really a musical about whether one particular ship gets finished. It is about what happens when an industry disappears and takes a community’s identity with it. The final act of completing Utopia becomes less about saving their jobs than refusing to allow somebody else to decide how their story ends.

That is where the production finds its emotional power. There is something genuinely moving about watching this community stand together beneath this enormous vessel, determined to finish what they started even as the future beyond the shipyard gates becomes increasingly uncertain.

I didn’t always understand precisely what was happening or why, but I always understood what Utopia meant to the people standing beneath her.

And perhaps that is why the ship needs to remain there throughout.

Visually spectacular, beautifully performed and deeply heartfelt, The Last Ship may occasionally struggle to make its complex industrial story completely clear, but the world it creates on the vast stage of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane is difficult to forget. It is a fittingly enormous production for a story about an industry that once built enormous things – and about the ordinary people whose lives were built around them.

★★★★

The Last Ship plays at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until 3 October 2026, the London engagement of its 2026 international tour, which has also visited Amsterdam, Paris, Brisbane and New York

Photo credit Nienke de Groot