Global reggae icon Shaggy is set to co-star with Sting in the reimagined 2026 adaptation of Sting’s musical The Last Ship for just two nights at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Shaggy plays the role of the Wallsend Ferryman. The production has toured globally this year, including stops in Amsterdam, Paris, and Brisbane, as well as a limited nine-show run at the famed Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
1.The Last Ship is rooted deeply in Sting’s memories of Wallsend. How did you approach reshaping such personal material while still making the story feel like it belongs to the wider community?
Sting’s actually incredibly generous about this – there have been things I’ve been terrified to pitch to him that he hasn’t even blinked at. I won’t go into detail, but if you read his memoir Broken Music you’ll find there are very personal things in this show. I admire that a lot. In my own work, I often try to put things that are precious to me into productions. Sometimes personal stories, sometimes physical objects that are precious to me. I think it charges and electrifies the space, and I think Sting’s done that by sharing so much of himself with the work. Having said that, in terms of reshaping the material, I think my job is mainly to ignore the sources and try to make it work on its own artistic terms – to find a storytelling logic to the material and tack towards that.
2. This production has already existed in several forms. What did you feel needed to change in the new book, and what did you know had to remain at the heart of the musical?The show has obviously been loved by audiences in different forms before, so there was a strong sense of ‘baby/bathwater’ at the start of the project – I am just another craftsman adding another layer and the main job is to serve Sting’s vision and his music. Having said that, I felt the show was closer to a set of parallel song cycles than a fully interwoven narrative tapestry when I took it on; I wasn’t clear about the big decisions that made the story happen in the way it did; and I wanted to lean into the mythic architecture of the work. I’ve been a big Sting fan all my life – I know the dance he’s danced with faith and fathers throughout his work. I could also see an Orphic aspect to the story; a Charon-type character whose meaning could be developed; a kind of Dantesque revisiting of the past going on. These were all avenues of development I pursued, alongside Sting and Leo Warner, the director, who was commendably clear-eyed about emphasising the role of the press in this story, the way the show was about Debordian ‘spectacle’ as much as it was about the practicalities of shipyard management. The show began when Sting read a newspaper article about a group of homeless men in Poland, ex-shipbuilders, who had started building a ship round the back of their local church. The vicar said in that very first article, ‘to me the ship is already sailing, it doesn’t matter whether it floats. Its success is giving these men purpose’. That’s pure Debord, I think, and very beautiful.
3. Your own work often explores place, memory and the quiet ways communities shape individual lives. What drew you personally to the world of The Last Ship?I think musically it’s extraordinary, and I was excited to serve that. I do agree that it’s in the same key as a lot of my original work, in its exploration of the formative symbiotic relationship between people and their context, although I would add that I don’t really know what I write about – I think if one was too clear on that, one wouldn’t write. But the play is about the wound in the past that led to present homelessness, that’s an obsession of mine; and it is, as you say, subtly but radically about memory. I don’t think this is a show that just happens to be set in the past – it’s a story of acute resistance being told at a particular moment in history. Perhaps that’s why it’s meaningful for the show to finally play London now: maybe the political context of this raucous rejection of the big world’s plans for a particular community has been coming into focus over the last few years, and now is its urgent time to be heard?
4. How did your collaboration with Sting work in practice? Were there moments when a new scene changed the meaning of an existing song—or when a song sent the story in an unexpected direction?My first work on the play was in the form of little essays I sent Sting about what I’d change. This evolved into time we spent together; when Sting is in the UK, we only live 40 minutes apart, so I’d go down to Lake House and we’d work there, arguing the toss or reading and singing to each other. Sometimes we were joined by others, most often our producer Karl Sydow. Then there was an intensive workshop last summer at Sting’s home outside Florence, with a workshop company of actors and the whole creative team in attendance; and then, of course, the constant work in rehearsals that accompanies opening a new show, which saw us collaborating on cuts and reworking in Hammersmith, Acton, Amsterdam, Paris, New York… the list is still growing! Sting said he thought I was like Miles Davis once we were into rehearsal, because all I really do is cut things, I don’t actually play any notes.
5. The closure of the shipyard is both a local story and part of a much wider history of disappearing industries and fractured communities. Has the musical acquired a different political or emotional meaning in 2026?The western de-industrialisation myth is such a powerful piece of our psyche – just look at how our new Prime Minister has summoned it as a way to express his own politics – it comes up everywhere you look, really. To play this show in the States, where fantasies of re-industrialisation and the activating of a disenfranchised post-industrialist base has so convulsed US politics, was charged. It’s also moving to do this show in the age of AI, when a new industrial revolution is proudly promising to put so many out of work. What the play really urges is for people to resist the things that are breaking them – even if quixotic, the act of resistance is beautiful, meaningful, triumphant. The act of insisting on living the life you really want is beautiful: that’s a big part of the play. While in Brisbane, we added a line where Sting breaks the fourth wall and calls out into the auditorium, ‘are we all to be expendable?’ I love that moment. It roots the play in an ethics of resistance and asks, where’s your line?
6. The production has travelled from Amsterdam and Paris to New York and Brisbane before returning to Britain. What have international audiences understood differently about this very North-Eastern story—and has watching those reactions changed how you see it yourself?There’s so much to say about this. I’ve learned the emotional power of the show
through watching audiences, particularly in its big choral numbers. I’ve also watched the company get better and better as they’ve played it. I actually pissed Leo off in New York, congratulating him on how moving I’d found it – ‘oh, so you weren’t moved before?!’, he said. Which, of course, I was. But shows grow, and this one on the stage of the Met felt so sinuous and poised and funny and propulsive to me, because the actors had dropped into the groove of the production. It’s a great privilege to watch talented performers over six months really finding a shared rhythm together. As to the travelling nature of the show – I confess, it’s felt funnier in countries where English is the first language. That’s created a different interaction with the auditorium, which is infectious and cumulative, and does good things to the work. But every auditorium has had a unique atmosphere – it was amazingly collective in Amsterdam, in Paris it was like seeing a gig at Wembley stadium, in New York it felt like this triumphant invasion. It’s a piratical musical. I’ve always worked in touring and I’m interested in the contract, the relationship, between a touring show and the places it goes to, passing through, fly-by-night, here today and gone tomorrow. I think this show is a disruptive work, in its musical references, in its ethical scaffolding, in the way it’s got up people’s noses (twelve years ago the press were sniffy, and that leaves a mark because it becomes fuel, it feeds the show’s innate defiance). I like that about it, because I’m interested in the minstrel, the highwayman and the pirate as English archetypes that express aspects of our collective identity, in the way the tramp is an American archetype, and I think the show embodies those archetypes in an interesting way.
For tickets and listing: https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/the-last-ship/