When Paul Allen's stage version of
Brassed Off appeared in 1998, two years after Mark Herman's film
about a small Yorkshire community's efforts to win a brass band
competition was first released, the Miners Strike that formed the
story's backdrop was still a fresh wound on Britain's landscape.
Thirty years after a civil war which became a defining moment of
Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's calculated assault on
trade unions, the play's current revival for a tour which arrives in
Edinburgh next week is an all too fitting reminder of one of the late
twentieth century's most inglorious eras.
The fact that Brassed Off makes its
point about how an entire community can be decimated by enforced pit
closures through both a romantic comedy and the unifying power of
music is testament to the play's staying power. Yorkshire-born Allen,
whose work in popular theatre has seen him forge close links with
Alan Ayckbourn and the Scarborough-based Stephen Joseph Theatre in
the Round, welcomes a second life for his play.
“You've now got a generation of both
performers and audiences who have never seen a pit-head,” Allen
says of some of the thinking behind a tour co-produced by the Touring
Consortium, York Theatre Royal and Bolton Octagon. “I was walking
along a beach in Wales with a friend, and they picked up a piece of
coal, which is such a rare thing to see now, but which used to be
something that was essential to our lives.
“If you go to Grimethorpe, which is
where the film was made, all you see are roundabouts named after the
pits that were closed down. Everything has been bulldozed flat, so
there's no real evidence of the mines. Yet both the mines and the
strike are such an important part of our history, so it's good to
keep them alive somehow, and to keep the anger about what happened
alive as well.”
In the film, the role of Danny, the
band leader whose closing speech in the film is a damning indictment
of the government forces behind the pit closures (and which was later
sampled on Chumbawamba's 1997 hit single, Tubthumping), was played by
the late Pete Postlethwaite. For this new production, the baton is
picked up by John McArdle. As a fan of the film,which also starred
Ewan McGregor and Tara Fitzgerald, he too recognises its populist
power.
“Sue Johnston was in it,” McArdle
says of his former fellow Brookside star, with whom he toured in Jim
Cartwright's play, Two. “She played one of the wives, and I loved
Pete Postlethwaite's performance, but playing it myself is like
playing any of the great parts, in that you have to try and forget
all the great actors who've done it, and bring something of yourself
to it.
“With Danny, though, there's only so
many ways you can do it, because he's a very driven character. All he
wants is to get his band to the Royal Albert hall, but he knows he's
dying, and he knows his community is being ripped apart, and that
politicises him, whereas in the past he's been apolitical.”
McArdle's own politicisation came
during his first exposure to theatre during his early twenties while
training to be a plasterer in Northampton, where “I helped build
Milton Keynes,” he jokes.
“7:84 brought a play to the college
called The Fish in the Sea,” McArdle says of an early play by the
late John McGrath, which was first seen in 1972 at Liverpool's
Everyman Theatre, the grassroots venue where Postlethwaite cut his
early acting teeth, “and I also saw a company called Belt and
Braces, so I was exposed to agit-prop theatre from very early on.
Where agit-prop hit you over the head with its politics, something
like Brassed Off takes a much subtler approach with it. Brassed Off
tells the story of a family, and it's entertainment for the masses,
but it becomes political, and, rather than preach to the converted,
it gets its message across to people who might not normally be
interested.”
When Brassed Off was first performed in
Sheffield, where the first four performers featured a poignant
appearance by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, it broke box office
records, and quickly transferred to the National Theatre. Since then,
and to Allen's astonishment, the play has become something of a
staple for amateur dramatics groups.
“This has often been in places that
have barely heard of Arthur Scargill and Maggie Thatcher,” says a
still bewildered Allen.
“The last time Allen visited
Grimethorpe, as well as roundabouts, he noticed that a memorial to
miners who had been killed down the pit had been erected near to the
war memorial that had long been in place.
“There were a lot more names on the
miners memorial than there were on the war memorial,” he says.
“There's an anger and a rage in places like Grimethorpe that exists
to this day about what was done to them. To have whole communities
destroyed like that was absolutely gob-smacking.
“Thirty years on, I think back to
1975, which was thirty years after the Second World War, when war
films were still very popular, although in terms of them being made
they dropped off shortly after. What happened after the strike, was
that, while agit-prop plays were being made at the time, there was a
silence. Since then, partly down to writers like Lee Hall, who wrote
Billy Elliot, which also came out of the strike, and partly down to a
system whereby cabinet papers are released under the thirty year
rule, so we can see exactly how determined Thatcher's government was
to break the unions, that silence has been broken.
“There is a long history that's come
out of the Miner's Strike, and some of that history is awful. In
parts of Wales where the mines shut, there are now two generations
who'll never work again, and nobody is helping these people. Whether
things like that causes the plays I don't know, but it somehow seeps
into the collective consciousness, and it's our job as writers to
articulate that.”
Brassed Off, King's Theatre, Edinburgh,
April 29-May 3
Mining For Gold – The Miners Strike
on stage and screen
The Strike – In 1988, alternative
comedy troupe The Comic Strip made their most famous film as part of
Channel Four's The Comic Strip Presents... series. The film focused
on a former miner and would-be screenwriter, whose personal account
of the strike is picked up by Hollywood producers, who proceed to
cast Al Pacino, played by Peter Richardson, as miners leader Arthur
Scargill and Meryl Steep, as played by Jennifer Saunders, as his wife
in a big budget action movie. This telling satire on how history can
be warped on film also starred Robbie Coltrane and Alexei Sayle, and
won numerous awards.
Billy Elliot – Like Brassed Off, the
Lee Hall-scripted film about an eleven year old boy who wants to
become a ballet dancer was set against a backdrop of the Miners
Strike in Tyneside, with several scenes filmed at the Ellington and
Lynemouth collieries in Northumberland. Released in 2000, Hall's tale
of the transcending power of art made a star of Jamie Bell, and has
gone on to become a hit stage musical.
The Battle of Orgreave – In 2001,
artist Jeremy Deller staged a re-enactment of one of the Miners
Strike's defining moments, when running battles in June 1984 between
Yorkshire police and striking miners looked like civil war. Deller
gathered together more than 1000 volunteers for the public event,
which utilised historical re-enactment societies as well as former
miners and policeman in a spectacle that was captured by film-maker
Mike Figgis.
The Herald, April 18th 2014
ends
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