A star-studded cast delivers a cosmic performance in The Starry Messenger, the comic drama written by playwright Kenneth Lonergan, which is packing them in at the Wyndham's Theatre. The story unfolds slowly with the astronomer (Mathew Broderick, Broadway star making his West End debut), bored with his teaching job and marriage, drawing you into the midst of his dull unexceptional life. The purposefully mundane style of the lecturer is lifted by Broderick's clever comedic interactions with his students.

Talented Canadian actress Elizabeth McGovern (an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee probably best known as Lady Cora in six seasons of Downton Abbey) is excellent playing his wife, a woman aware that her marriage is in turmoil, bringing a raw vulnerability to the stage. Other supporting stars shine - Angela (played by Rosalind Eleazar) the young single-mum lover that enters his life, who nurses and befriends the cantankerous dying patient Norman, played by Jim Norton.

Lonergan's characters are real and relatable - the 52-year-old professor disappointed with his life, starting an affair, knowing it's wrong and doing it anyway. The young lover, looking for a role model for her son while caught up in the struggles of being a working single mother. At home, the caring wife highlighting the banality of their married life with conversations of chores and visits from the mother-in-law; the teenage son shouting retorts from the basement and the elderly patient fed-up with living. 

It is a bitter-sweet drama, growing in pace as events evolve,  exploring mid-life crises in a sensitive and compelling way. Well worth seeing.