Sting said the decline of hands-on work may be feeding some of the darker habits now attached to modern masculinity as he announced on Wednesday that his musical about a dying shipyard community will arrive in the West End in autumn.
“I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I’m lucky,” he said. “We’ve lost something there.”
The singer, 74, tied that loss to a wider social shift, saying, “I don’t have any answers, but maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength.” He added: “It’s rare we have to use it.”
The Last Ship is built around men facing the collapse of a shipyard community similar to the one Sting knew growing up in Wallsend, where the yards closed during deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 80s. The show debuted in Chicago in 2014 before a run on Broadway, then later toured widely after revisions that cut some characters and brought in a new book by Barney Norris. Sting said the drama is rooted in a place where work gave men not only wages but identity.
He said the shutdowns in the north of England opened a long period in which successive governments failed the region. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
The musical follows men in a moment of crisis as their sense of purpose is taken away. One character asks, “For what are we men without a ship to complete?” Sting said the line captures the pride that came from making something tangible. “The work was awful and dangerous and hard, but those guys could look back and say: ‘Well, I built that,’” he said. “The civic pride was massive.”
He was careful not to romanticise the industry. “I’m the guy who didn’t want to work there and for good reason,” he said. The shipyards were dangerous places, with asbestos, toxic chemicals, hundreds of accidents a year and deaths not uncommon. That reality is part of why The Last Ship has changed over time since its Broadway opening, where it drew mixed reviews before the later rewrite.
The return to London comes after the production played in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2018 and as Sting, long associated with stories of class, labour and memory, revisits the world that shaped him. The move places a story about industrial decline back into a city where many of its themes still feel immediate, and it gives the show a second life on a bigger stage than the one it first sailed on.
