Close the Coalhouse Door; Misterman; Black T-shirt Collection – review
Northern Stage, Newcastle; Lyttelton; Cottesloe, London
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| Tyne spirit: Chris Connel and Jane Holman in Close the Coalhouse Door: ‘the roars were not only of approval and enjoyment but of absolute recognition’. Photograph: Keith Pattison |
I have never been in a theatre where an audience so totally claimed a show as their own. Close the Coalhouse Door was first staged in 1968 on the outskirts of Newcastle. When I saw it last week, several members of the audience had been at that production; about half of those who stayed behind to quiz actors and director had come from mining families. The roars were not only of approval and enjoyment but of absolute recognition.
Alan Plater's play draws on the stories of Sid Chaplin and, in the manner of Joan Littlewood, on music hall tradition, to bring to life episodes from the history of mining in the north-east: exploitation, revolts, defeats and occasional glimmers of light. "You live in the past," complains a long-haired, mini-skirted girl to her boyfriend's family. "That's the best place," comes one retort, "especially if you're a Sunderland supporter."
Northern Stage, who produce in collaboration with the other firebrand Newcastle theatre, Live, embrace the past of the play in the spirit of one of the characters: "It might be history to some people. To us, it's family, pet." They have turned a studio theatre into a miners' club of the early 60s (with darts, a meat draw, film of a beauty contest to the sound of "Poetry in Motion" and terrific geometric fabrics), hung a miners' banner in the bar and put on a display of Keith Pattison's fine, gruelling, black-and-white photographs of the 1984 miners' strike. Still, the aim is not to embalm but to point up continuity. Lee Hall – dramatist not only of Billy Elliot but of The Pitman Painters, which premiered at Live – has ironically topped and tailed Plater's play with scenes in which people look forward with innocent confidence to the future of the mining industry. Hall's imprint goes deep: two near-teenage girls pausing excitedly in front of Pattison's pictures recognised them immediately: "It's like Billy Elliot!"
Close the Coalhouse Door is whole-heartedly partisan and unashamedly (sometimes a bit of shame might come in handy here) didactic. Samuel West's lively Brechtian production glories in its ethos, from the opening moment in which a poster for The Iron Lady exhibits Margaret Thatcher's face with her eyes lit from behind by glowing miners' lamps. The cast push round Soutra Gilmour's impressive design, in which a pithead, etched against the sky, dwarfs a terrace house. All the music – one song is arranged for eight guitars – is played onstage, with one particularly rousing moment when Jane Holman, as a mother in a pinny, turns her knitting needles into drumsticks and makes scaffolding and furniture resound to her beat. Alex Glasgow's wonderful songs, inspired by Tyneside music hall, are crucial to the play's spirit: a "Socialist ABC" (in which "F" is for "old Ludwig Feuerbach, the first one to see it was wrong"), the sardonic "As Soon as This Pub Closes" and, above all, the ferocious, forthright title song. This last alone is enough to ensure further ovations when the play sets off on tour in May.
Enda Walsh has taken a tremendous risk with his own play. He has directed the one-man Misterman not in a small, easily subdued theatre but in the vast area of an opened-up Lyttelton stage, on which he has unleashed all manner of wild sounds and lights. A monologue has to hold its own in a clanging, cavernous, iron-clad space. One figure is pitted against a wide and lofty arena with unseeable depths, different layers and a giant muddle: strip lighting dangles, illuminated crosses spring up like the resurrected dead.
The speech could be overwhelmed or, as likely, seem overblown. Actually, the monstrousness of the production – which makes the speaker look like a leprechaun abandoned by his mother on Halloween – makes the play. It's not only that the spectacular lighting and sound designs of Adam Silverman and Gregory Clarke rip up the stage with shadows and flashes and rumbles. They also deliver a version of how our man sees himself: a victim caught in an unyielding trap, and a mighty revenger compelled to fling himself against badness.
Misterman is a rich stew of Beckett and the Bible, with one nod to WB Yeats. The arc of its plot is predictable. Here is a fellow whose days are mostly spent getting Jammie Dodgers for his mam, being sneered at by his neighbours, perceiving evil around him. He's rejected by a girl he adores. He makes tapes (a la Krapp) of sneerers and evil-doers and plays these back to himself in his limbo-like hangar. There is never much prospect of a happy ending.
Walsh's script – lush but bewildering – needs help from its only actor. It gets it in abundance from Cillian Murphy, who was so vigorous and plaintive 16 years ago in Disco Pigs, another Walsh play about sealed-off human beings. Now he sports Catherine-wheel eyes and a slightly slack jaw. He rushes around the stage like a monkey in a jungle, leaping from one level to another, antically cooking, furiously listening to his tapes. He ventriloquises the voices of his foes. For the first five minutes of the evening, when he's trying to dismember a Doris Day tape that chirps brightly out over the bleakness of his retreat, he could be Charlie Chaplin gone to the bad. One way and another, Walsh has rescued his own play by the dynamic ambition of his production.
Black T-shirt Collection is at first glance a more traditional one-man show: crisis and contemplation in a small, dark space. But it's rare and welcome for the National to stage a piece of storytelling. Inua Ellams's monologue has an unusual plot featuring Muslim and Christian foster brothers in Nigeria who set up a T-shirt business, and a rather underdeveloped political aspect.
It also has some dashing touches: it's hard not to warm to the idea of a garment that features the footprint of an assailant, or one that has a detachable back so that a thief can leave a pursuing cop grasping a bit of fabric. Ellams's other career is as a graphic artist, and some of his drawings are used, invitingly and innovatively, as scenery. His intriguing show would be enhanced by displaying more sketches and more T-shirts – perhaps customised for his audience, or critics.
Alan Plater's play draws on the stories of Sid Chaplin and, in the manner of Joan Littlewood, on music hall tradition, to bring to life episodes from the history of mining in the north-east: exploitation, revolts, defeats and occasional glimmers of light. "You live in the past," complains a long-haired, mini-skirted girl to her boyfriend's family. "That's the best place," comes one retort, "especially if you're a Sunderland supporter."
Northern Stage, who produce in collaboration with the other firebrand Newcastle theatre, Live, embrace the past of the play in the spirit of one of the characters: "It might be history to some people. To us, it's family, pet." They have turned a studio theatre into a miners' club of the early 60s (with darts, a meat draw, film of a beauty contest to the sound of "Poetry in Motion" and terrific geometric fabrics), hung a miners' banner in the bar and put on a display of Keith Pattison's fine, gruelling, black-and-white photographs of the 1984 miners' strike. Still, the aim is not to embalm but to point up continuity. Lee Hall – dramatist not only of Billy Elliot but of The Pitman Painters, which premiered at Live – has ironically topped and tailed Plater's play with scenes in which people look forward with innocent confidence to the future of the mining industry. Hall's imprint goes deep: two near-teenage girls pausing excitedly in front of Pattison's pictures recognised them immediately: "It's like Billy Elliot!"
Close the Coalhouse Door is whole-heartedly partisan and unashamedly (sometimes a bit of shame might come in handy here) didactic. Samuel West's lively Brechtian production glories in its ethos, from the opening moment in which a poster for The Iron Lady exhibits Margaret Thatcher's face with her eyes lit from behind by glowing miners' lamps. The cast push round Soutra Gilmour's impressive design, in which a pithead, etched against the sky, dwarfs a terrace house. All the music – one song is arranged for eight guitars – is played onstage, with one particularly rousing moment when Jane Holman, as a mother in a pinny, turns her knitting needles into drumsticks and makes scaffolding and furniture resound to her beat. Alex Glasgow's wonderful songs, inspired by Tyneside music hall, are crucial to the play's spirit: a "Socialist ABC" (in which "F" is for "old Ludwig Feuerbach, the first one to see it was wrong"), the sardonic "As Soon as This Pub Closes" and, above all, the ferocious, forthright title song. This last alone is enough to ensure further ovations when the play sets off on tour in May.
Enda Walsh has taken a tremendous risk with his own play. He has directed the one-man Misterman not in a small, easily subdued theatre but in the vast area of an opened-up Lyttelton stage, on which he has unleashed all manner of wild sounds and lights. A monologue has to hold its own in a clanging, cavernous, iron-clad space. One figure is pitted against a wide and lofty arena with unseeable depths, different layers and a giant muddle: strip lighting dangles, illuminated crosses spring up like the resurrected dead.
The speech could be overwhelmed or, as likely, seem overblown. Actually, the monstrousness of the production – which makes the speaker look like a leprechaun abandoned by his mother on Halloween – makes the play. It's not only that the spectacular lighting and sound designs of Adam Silverman and Gregory Clarke rip up the stage with shadows and flashes and rumbles. They also deliver a version of how our man sees himself: a victim caught in an unyielding trap, and a mighty revenger compelled to fling himself against badness.
Misterman is a rich stew of Beckett and the Bible, with one nod to WB Yeats. The arc of its plot is predictable. Here is a fellow whose days are mostly spent getting Jammie Dodgers for his mam, being sneered at by his neighbours, perceiving evil around him. He's rejected by a girl he adores. He makes tapes (a la Krapp) of sneerers and evil-doers and plays these back to himself in his limbo-like hangar. There is never much prospect of a happy ending.
Walsh's script – lush but bewildering – needs help from its only actor. It gets it in abundance from Cillian Murphy, who was so vigorous and plaintive 16 years ago in Disco Pigs, another Walsh play about sealed-off human beings. Now he sports Catherine-wheel eyes and a slightly slack jaw. He rushes around the stage like a monkey in a jungle, leaping from one level to another, antically cooking, furiously listening to his tapes. He ventriloquises the voices of his foes. For the first five minutes of the evening, when he's trying to dismember a Doris Day tape that chirps brightly out over the bleakness of his retreat, he could be Charlie Chaplin gone to the bad. One way and another, Walsh has rescued his own play by the dynamic ambition of his production.
Black T-shirt Collection is at first glance a more traditional one-man show: crisis and contemplation in a small, dark space. But it's rare and welcome for the National to stage a piece of storytelling. Inua Ellams's monologue has an unusual plot featuring Muslim and Christian foster brothers in Nigeria who set up a T-shirt business, and a rather underdeveloped political aspect.
It also has some dashing touches: it's hard not to warm to the idea of a garment that features the footprint of an assailant, or one that has a detachable back so that a thief can leave a pursuing cop grasping a bit of fabric. Ellams's other career is as a graphic artist, and some of his drawings are used, invitingly and innovatively, as scenery. His intriguing show would be enhanced by displaying more sketches and more T-shirts – perhaps customised for his audience, or critics.
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