Like the proverbial bus, you can wait ages for a good new play and then two potential Olivier winners come along at once. I'm referring to Polly Stenham's That Face, and to this one by Lee Hall which has started previews in the NT's Cottesloe theatre. It's a production by Newcastle's Live Theatre company which Nicholas Hytner saw on its home turf in 2007 and invited to London. Lee Hall isn't yet a national treasure like Alan Bennett but I think he's heading in that direction. I interviewed him a couple of years ago about his best known work, Billy Elliott, and he talked to me at length about how recreating the film as a musical enabled him to restore a lot of material that was cut from the screen version, which had a much less sharp political edge. Hall has a great gift for comedy (I remember his adaptation of A Servant of Two Masters with Jason Watkins distributing spaghetti around the audience at the Young Vic) and isn't afraid of emotion (his radio play Spoonface Steinberg is said to have had motorway drivers pulling over to the hard shoulder in tears). But I was wondering how he would manage to bring alive a fairly consensual story about a group of miners in the industrial northeast who formed a painting group in the 1930s. The last play I saw about Art (with a capital A) was Antony Sher's The Giant about Michelangelo, and it was a stinker. Genius is a difficult subject to convey on stage, but artistic creativity is a much richer field to explore. The pitmen painters of Ashington are probably little more than a footnote in the history of 20th century British art, though their paintings were exhibited in London and abroad, but as a human story they provide rich material.
I've seen lots of rather clunky plays about miners; mostly they have a narrator at the side of the stage giving us information that the writer didn't have the skill to show on stage; sometimes there's a scene where the hornyhanded sons of toil shower away the coaldust. This play avoids all of that, and the miners are seen in their off-duty best suits. The only reminders of the colliery in Max Robert's deft production come in the form of sound between the scenes. The play opens with a group of miners gathering in a hut for a Workers Educational Association lecture on Art Appreciation; strictly speaking not all of them are miners -- there's a Marxist dental technician and an unemployed youth as well as the real pitmen. Art lecturer Robert Lyon struggles with the Geordie accents ('I'm terribly sorry, I didn't quite catch that') just the way that the Cottesloe audience does -- more evidence of Hall's skill as a dramatist. As he shows his black and white slides to a row of blank uncomprehending faces (these men left school at ten) he quickly realises that the Sistine Chapel is not the best place to start. Instead he gets them making linocuts. Gradually they progress, learn how to talk about their own work and each other's. None of them is going to become Michelangelo, but that's not the point. There's a very funny scene where Lyon invites a model to pose nude but runs into a firestorm of working class prudery. Hall's writing about the working class, just as in Billy Elliott, is warm and sympathetic but never sentimental. The group is dominated by a old-school trade union martinet ('This is a democratic organisation. There won't be any voting around here!') and the play explores how the group not only helps the individuals gain confidence but also possibly prevents them from developing to their full potential. It's very funny, the cast are terrific, and Hall's play is infinitely more thought-provoking about art than the play of the same name by Yasmina Reza which ran in the West End for two or three years. I admire how Hall managed to find plenty of conflict and drama in this story while sticking to the facts in art critic William Feaver's book. One of the pitmen painters, Oliver Kilbourn (brilliantly played by Christopher Connel) is offered a stipend by a wealthy local art collector to give up his job and paint fulltime, but ultimately says no. Does money get in the way of art? Or are 'real' artists the ones who sell their work? Does art have to have a meaning? Anybody can wield a paintbrush, but can anybody be an artist? Does it matter if art is 'good'? One of the pitmen looks a an abstract by Ben Nicholson and says, 'Anyone could have done that. I could have done that.' Back comes Miss Sutherland: 'But you didn't. Ben Nicholson did.' For anyone who's every come out of Tate Modern, or any other art gallery, wondering about these questions, this is the play to see. The paintings are visible not just on their easels, but projected overhead on screens. And there's a great moment when the multi-talented actor Ian Kelly, playing Robert Lyon, draws a charcoal portrait in full view of the audience. What Alan Bennett did for education in The History Boys, this play does for art. And it's just as funny. But as in Billy Elliott, there's a strong political subtext, which is more overt than in Bennett. Hall writes in the programme (luckily not on one of the pages printed in illegible black on dark red) that 'The idea that art is somehow a commodity, that culture is something one consumes rather than takes part in, is, of course, a very modern notion.' I'm not sure I agree with that. Artists, with rare exceptions, have depended on patrons and buyers and their tastes at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I have a lot more sympathy with what Hall goes on to write about our own society's political and cultural failure since the Attlee government, which is the moment when his play ends on a note of optimism. 'Despite the advances in education and the blossoming of the welfare state, somehow we have failed to "democratise" the riches of culture. That the Group managed to achieve so much unaided and unabetted should remind us that dumbing down is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible. That is a lie perpetrated by those who want to sell us shit. Culture is something we share and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.' Of course, Hall is right. Of course, we're now a society where miners are outnumbered a hundred to one by people going to dance classes. But we're also a society where the people who decide programming on our publicly funded television (the Ban the Bard Corporation) believes that they can't possibly challenge a mass audience by showing it Shakespeare, because he's not 'accessible'. Actually, that kind of thinking is more elitist than anything the Pitmen Painters encountered. Lee Hall's great themes in this play are the waste of individual creativity and the barriers that prevent culture and art being accessible to all; two generations ago the barriers were to do with class, poverty and industrial exploitation; today the factors keeping the masses out of the Sistine Chapel are more insidious, but just as effective.
It was rather brilliant, wasn't it? Were you there Monday? Didn't see you.
Posted by: Andrew | May 21, 2008 at 10:25 AM