Alan Plater's Close The Coalhouse Door
The Old Library, Mansfield
April 19th 2004
Three cheers for Front Room cast.
It was a case of unfurl the red flags and dust off your copies of
Das Kapital for this powerful celebration of close knit communities
and the mining industry’s trade union history.
The Old Library staged this week-long production to mark the bitter
1984 strike – and they certainly did it justice with this excellent
production.
The play is set in 1968 in the village of Brokenback deep in the
Durham coalfields as the Milburn family celebrates a golden wedding
anniversary – using flashbacks as the family recounts the miners’ struggles
to win fair treatment.
This is a superbly written play that combines great humour with real
touching emotion and the excellent Front Room team certainly do it
justice with the whole cast turning in outstanding performances during
it’s five day run last week.
“ Brave”
The ethos behind the play is best summed up by director Paul Caputa
who, in his programme notes, dedicates it to “the brave working
people who over the years fought and suffered in order to give their
children a better life than the one they had”.
This is probably not something for anyone who thought Maggie was
right, but really who actually thought that?
It traces the battles between the early union leaders and the mine
owners for basic rights such as being paid in money not tokens and
a maximum working week for under 10s.
Then comes the moment of hope when the fat-cat owners were pushed
aside by Clement Attlee’s socialist government in 1947 and
the mines became the property of the state.
The play then moves on to the union’s new struggle – no
longer for decent conditions but fighting attempts by successive
governments to close pit after pit.
Close-Knit
Despite the play’s celebration of the close-knit mining communities
and their willingness to fight for each other, it does not hide from
what the industry did to people.
As a young mine worker John Milburn says: “You’ve got
a better chance of dying of rotting lungs in this village than anywhere
else in the country.”
One of the play’s recurring themes is that the miners did eventually
win each dispute, they just had to wait a while – winning the
1833 strike in 1873 and the 1926 general strike in 1947.
They might have to wait a little longer to win the 1984 strike…but
the problem is there are no pits or miners left to notice if the
victory does come.
