Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Coal Not Dole
Crowne Plaza Hotel

Shirley Dent

For all those theatre companies seeking to get the review with such pullable lines as 'touching and funny', 'I laughed till I cried and I cried till I laughed', here’s a hint: get a few miners in the line-up and add on some brassy tarts with hearts.

This is not an indictment against Coal Not Dole, which is a well-structured, well-narrated and well-choreographed drama, performed with gusto and commitment by a young cast who obviously really believe in and care about what happens on stage and what is said on stage (and no, I don’t mean the lines). But any drama dealing with miners and touching on - even glancing at - the struggles of the 1980s and all the baggage entailed therewith now have to deal with baggage of another kind which has nothing to do with the politics or ideology of that day or this. This baggage is of the aesthetic kind.

Anyone approaching the subject of the 1980s miners' strike has now to deal with that squidgy, warm, bendable and dependable carpetbag called cliché. And yes, Brassed Off and Billy Elliot, it is you I am pointing the finger at.

Dancing-at-the-weekend-pit-workers, fag-puffing-sweethearts, stoic-old-timers-who-crack-under-the strain, the-mates-who-find-themselves-on-different-sides, the-scab-and-their-family, the-wife-and-women-who-hold-it-all-together-and-even-discovers-new-found-talents. It all sounds startlingly familar, doesn’t it? And that’s because it is both on and off stage. Cliché is truth condensed to saccharine proportions, but it is nevertheless true, and to complain about these characters would be to accuse Viz of going for cheap laughs.

What irritated me about Coal Not Dole was the potential to break down cliché willfully sqaundered, and the audience’s lapdog willingness to be satisfied with that cliché: a miner had only to pull a slighty non-plussed comical face and the audience (which was a deservedly full-house) would be punctured by chirrups of glee. Why? Because we’ve taken our cue about what to expect from drama about the working class and working life from heavily-romaticised versions portrayed in Brassed Off, Billy Elliot and The Full Monty. Some of those films are great enetertainment but the aesthetic fallout has been a shorthand that speaks without poetry.

Cliché may be true, but Adrienne Rich’s dictum that 'a lie is a shortcut through someone’s personality' is also true and I felt that this production took too many shortcuts. What I want in mining drama is a Das Boot underground, where the pressures and connections of human intimacy and human comradeship in confined physical and mental space come to the fore.

If we siphon off all politics, all social commentary, all ideology, all history from what mining is and means, and just look at it for its aesthetic potential, then it is truly extraordinary, a human conveyor belt underground that powered the industrial revolution.

George Orwell used all his great descriptive abilities to explore just that in 'Down the Mine'. Mining is such a strange thing for human beings to be engaged in, and it is startling, when we stop to think about, how little that raft of 1990s miner movies showed of that dark below ground world.

Pit-poets writing in the 19th century did describe this world, it flows through their lines like a dark stream, and often it is the world that informs their aesthetic. Joseph Skipsey describes Swinburne’s ability to interpret Blake as the light of a davy lamp illumintaing the coal black pit of our minds. It is a fantastic metaphor because it is both true and returns the aesthetic world to the reader anew.

Full credit then to Coal Not Dole’s writer-director James Graham for opening with poise - literally. The lads come in and strike gargantuan poses of Promethean effort (at this early starge I was reminded of Tony Harrison’s Prometheus and the wonderful smelting of miners). Then - and I got excited at this point - the Seven Dwarves theme tune, 'Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go,' piped up as the miners mimed - mmm, er - work.

I got excited because I thought 'A-ha, here’s a production that has caught on to the Disney-fication of miners and the miners' strike now that they are no longer a threat and it is a political irrelevance'. And I do think there was a real commitment in writing and acting to bring the audience something that was true and true in depth. But the lure of cliche was too strong.

There were moments where inspiration shone through. The writing was true to voice but had enough fluidity in that voice to let wit and innovation flow through. I particularly liked the jibe at Arthur Scargill having put the 'dick' in 'dictator'. The casting also showed the potential for the production to move beyond the also-rans.

Mark Joseph as Mickey and Tess Mitchell as Barbara really had it going on at moments, but needed to be told to hold-it-back or bring-it-on in the same way as the script needed to discipline itself at the same time that it pushed itself on. I thought all these things simultaneously when the little matter of ballots (or no ballots) was brought up then skipped over in a scene between Mickey and Barbara.

My gold star goes to Kathryn Oliver as Flora. With no make-up she convinced me she was a sixty-year old stuck at a sewing machine for forty years. And she couldn’t have been a day over 21. As they say, talent is wasted on the young.

Geoff Kidder

As someone involved in supporting the epic struggle that was the miners' strike, I found the characters in Coal not Dole only too life like, and the attention to detail in the dialogue striking.

The frustrated local strike leader unable to get working miners to join the strike. Other strikers who were happy to make jokes about Scargill behind his back but followed his leadership at the end of the day. It was left to Mickey the 'reluctant striker' to question the bureaucratic running of the strike by asking how you can have a national strike without a national ballot?

As the failure to make the strike national became apparent, it was graphically brought home how the divisions between geographical areas solidified and spread to cause division and strife within communities and individual families.

As a piece of theatre this play was highly entertaining, well acted, extremely witty and unlike much retrospective work it encapsulated the feelings and attitudes of the time. The spirit of resistance of the mining communities was well captured, especially by the women. But at the end of the day the strike's defeat and its comparison to the Luddites could only breed fatalism. The playing of the music from the old Hamlet cigar advertisement for what seemed an eternity reinforced the point.

This excellent play brought back many memories but showed me that those seeking the spirit of resistance today will need to look elsewhere.