| The Pitmen Painters |
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The Pitmen Paintersby Lee Hallinspired by the book by William Feaver National Theatre (UK) and Live Theatre Newcastle Dublin: Gaiety Theatre October 6th -10th, 2009 Presented as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. On Tour: Cardiff New Theatre 13 - 17 October; Milton Keynes Theatre 19 - 24 October; Lyric Theatre Salford 27 - 31 October; Lyceum Sheffield 3 - 7 November; Theatre Royal Norwich10 - 14 November; Theatre Royal, Bath 17 - 21 November; Theatre Royal Plymouth 24 - 28 November. http://www.dublintheatrefestival.com http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk http://www.ashingtongroup.co.uk/home.html  In 1934 a group of miners in Ashington, North-East England, began an art appreciation class under the tutelage of a lecturer from Armstrong College in nearby Newcastle. The class was organised under the banner of the Workers Educational Association, intended as a general interest endeavour with no practical dimension. Tutor Robert Lyon soon found that the clearest way to teach the principles of art to working class men without even much in the way of anecdotal knowledge of art history was to facilitate the creation of art of their own. The result was the now famous Ashington Group, a collective working man’s art school that gained significant fame in pre-war Britain and continued to operate thereafter. Lee Hall’s play summarises and compresses the history of the Ashington Group, creating a set of five characters standing in for thirty or more and focusing most heavily on the theme of untutored art in the context of modernism. It dramatises how a group of working men developed a type of political aesthetic as heavily informed by developments in industrial modernity as any avant-garde experiment, but deployed techniques that were non-classical by dint of the absence of formal skill rather than outright defiance of aesthetic norms. In doing so, Hall does not suggest an ignorance of meaning or precedent. On the contrary, his play precisely dramatises how these men encountered the tradition of art through their practice, and gradually found their place within it, all the while continuing their daily work for their regular (low) income. In form, the play comes to resemble a kind of art history class in itself. It focuses on the disparate reactions of a motley crew of characters to Robert Lyon’s (Ian Kelly) teaching (or at least his context / agenda setting), which means that as Lyon sets a task or raises a topic in aesthetics, meaning, or social purpose, the audience too is introduced to its contours by way of mapping their route to a response through those of the characters. There is George Brown (Deka Walmsley), the officious rulebook-wielding Union Rep whose sense of the world is informed by proper procedure. There is Harry Wilson (Michael Hodgson), steeped in Marxist dogma and constantly questioning the political value of any production of art. There is Jimmy Floyd (David Whitaker), perennial comic relief, embodying the unpretentious innocent. There is Oliver Kilbourn (Christopher Connel), the group’s real-life superstar, representing the instinctual artist with the passion for a broadening of horizons and yet equally passionate about community, family, and rootedness. There is also ‘young lad’ (Brian Lonsdale), the restless unemployed youth granted entry ‘on sufferance’ and acting as a protean ‘angry young man’ who will eventually face extinction in the war. Though based on real people and using their real names and depictions of their real works of art (projected onto screens in the theatre), these are, nonetheless, dramatic archetypes deployed by Lee to explore attitudes towards art and self-expression in the context of the culture and economics of 1930s Britain. It works beautifully for the most part on precisely these terms. Though it is transparently dogmatic, it is effectively dramatised, and the performances are crisp and focused. Each man knows his role, so to speak, and performs it with believable humanity as well as symbolic resonance. It is warm, funny, and definitively not condescending in telling a truly fascinating real-life story, most of the details of which are based on fact. However, the play lurches awkwardly into overt didacticism as it moves to a conclusion. The human dynamics of characterisation formed by the scenes of a group of individuals encountering art and finding themselves relative to it give way to a set of diatribes on elitism and a frankly tacky wrap-up that presumes to juxtapose the optimism of social agenda of post-war nationalisation with the failures of contemporary capitalism not by dramatising it, but in the most gallingly undeserved of ways - through surtitles summarising forty years of subsequent history. The play’s final scene, in which the entire cast unite to sing a miner’s song is clearly reaching for elegaic pathos, but it feels manipulative, sentimental, and lazy. It is also surprising, given how much care and attention had been put into the rest of the writing, and the deliberation with which complex discourses around class and culture had been unfolded throughout. Merely clubbing the audience with the message by way of ending the show seems somehow worse than failure and more like an act of self-negation. Still, the show inspires interest in its subject, and no doubt will draw audiences back towards the original art and artists, and that certainly is a worthwhile result. Harvey O'Brien
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