Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
In December 1982, twelve miners descended 2000 feet below the surface of Kinneil Colliery in Bo’ness. This was no ordinary working day, however, but a sit-in protest at the announcement by the National Coal Board of the pit’s imminent closure. Two years before the Miners’ Strike, and with no support from the unions, the protest’s failure was the shape of things to come as British working class culture was transformed forever.
Almost forty-three years after the Kinneil sit-in, Sylvia Dow’s play excavates this piece of local history in a play that is both mournful and monumental. As it honours the recent past, it also looks to the future in a parallel plot in which a couple of centuries hence everyone is living underground, with the perils of outside an alluring totem of what went before.
For those who occupy both time zones in Philip Howard’s production for Dow’s Sylvian company and the Bo’ness based Barony Theatre, the prospect of change for the better is something to aspire to. This is the case both for Jerry - eighteen in 1982 - who becomes our narrator, and for seventeen-year-old Lily Seven, who has set her heart on going out into the upper world. Jerry, his old school socialist dad Matt and sceptical work mate Andy only want a living wage. Lily Seven and her friend Freddie Nine, meanwhile, read old books en route to a hand-me-down enlightenment that sees them look to an even bigger future than the one they occupy.
Dow, Howard, and their cast of five fuse 1970s agit-prop with the sort of dystopian eco-fable that fuelled sci-fi films from the same era that in turn looked back to the brave new world of E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story, The Machine Stops. The result in this piece, developed from a ten-minute short performed in 2014, is a lovingly realised tale of hope in a darkened world.
Those living through each era criss-cross the centuries on Becky Minto’s pitch black set, as Philip Pinsky’s quietly seismic underscore pulses the play’s light and shade. Andrew Rothney as Jerry, Barrie Hunter as Matt and Rhys Anderson as Andy leave their mark in a way that forms a legacy for Holly Howden Gilchrist’s Lily Seven and Reece Montague’s Freddie Nine to reclaim. As worlds change when history is made, this is a play that dazzles.
The Herald, May 23rd 2025
Ends
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