Writer: Boff Whalley
Director: Elvi Piper
40 years on from the miners’ strike that changed life permanently in South Kirkby (and many another pit village, some of them included on Red Ladder’s current tour) Boff Whalley’s surprisingly funny, but ultimately incredibly moving, play returns with an identical cast to the initial production ten years ago. As Victoria Brazier remarked, the Grove Hall is the perfect place to stage this production, a community hall, with a packed audience, many of them former miners and their wives who lived through the events depicted, the union banner on display.
The play concentrates on three women, with limited stress on the horrors of the strike: a news broadcast, heavily biased in favour of the police, tells of the violence of Orgreave, Olive adds her own recollection, Isabel has an amusing account of the snowman, the officious police sergeant and the concrete pole, but for the most part in Elvi Piper’s briskly efficient production we share the conversations and arguments of the women, their establishment of Carston Women Against Pit Closures and their attempts, generally comically presented, to find a bit more food (liberating cabbages – or a sheep!).
The play is framed by Isabel’s birthdays: March 1984 and 1985. The three women are very different, but, as the clever song says, each of them is “stuck with me”. Olive works in the NCB offices, has a great deal of time for the local vicar (until he reveals his Thatcherite sympathies) and is enthused by a visit to Sheffield to organise her local WAPC group. Mary appears to be less serious (could you believe appearing on stage in a Lloyd Webber conflation,Jesus Christ Superstarlight Express?), but is equally intense, delivering a fine song/monologue on the subject of public speaking. Isabel has a problem, a boy friend who is a police cadet, and is the last to join.
The action proceeds via a sequence of short scenes, many of them punctuated by excellent songs (musical director, pianist and occasional actor Beccy Owen). Owen gets her moment in the spotlight when accompanying herself, appropriately enough, on the washboard while recounting, in best folk song style, how she had to wash her miner’s clothes. There are plenty of stirring We Are Women moments, but the song that lives in the memory is What Price Coal?, sung at the funeral of two boys digging for coal.
Victoria Brazier (Olive) is exceptional, tart and witty, her journey particularly affecting. Stacey Sampson is a boisterous presence as Mary and Claire O’Connor’s Isabel represents the younger generation with a touching performance. All three operate superbly as an ensemble, their delivery of songs spot-on, their movement of props and furniture between scenes enabling the production to build up a fair head of steam.
A word about the title. The men, of course, did go back (not for very long in many cases), but it is the women who vowed, “We’re not going back” – and such is still the case, with Women Against Pit Closures still active. The play begins with a song about an ordinary village where nothing changes and ends with a song celebrating the fact that life in the village has permanently changed.
Reviewed on 9th March 2024. Touring the North of England.
The Reviews Hub Score
Immensely moving
