Abstract
Abstract This article considers the performance of English cultural identity through a reading of Sting’s semi-autobiographical musical, The Last Ship, seen on Broadway in 2014. Drawing on historical concepts of English identity and studies of regional social identity in Wallsend – the north-east English town where The Last Ship is set, I suggest that the musical presents an English identity that is uneasy with its present, and a songwriter uneasy with his past. Specifically, I consider the three iterations of the title song, considering the intrinsic relationship between myth and material environment. First, in a sermon by the local parish priest, Jim O’Brien, ‘the last ship’ offers a metaphor that locates the northern shipbuilding industry as a global bastion of British heritage. In a version by shipyard foreman Jackie White, the display of quixotism evidences a parochialism and localism that configures a specific version of ‘home’ and community—one which did not find resonance with a Broadway audience. Finally, the third iteration is read as a performance of heredity and familial reconciliation, the song of a writer – and a nation – at sea, struggling to find harbour.
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