‘Close the Coalhouse Door’: Pre-performance talk
Samuel West
Date: 26th April 2012
Time: 17:30 - 18:30
Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building
A TRANSCRIPT OF THE LECTURE IS AVAILABLE BELOW
Samuel West is known for both his directing and acting work. His directing credits include The Lady’s Not for Burning (Minerva Chichester), Così fan Tutte (English National Opera), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Bristol Old Vic) and Three Women and a Piano Tuner (Minerva and Hampstead). From 2005 - 2007 Sam was Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, where he directed The Romans in Britain, Insignificance, the European premiere of The Clean House and As You Like It (also RSC). Since then he has directed Dealer’s Choice (Menier Chocolate Factory and Trafalgar Studios), Waste (Almeida), Money (BBC Radio 3) and The Magic Flute for the Palestine Mozart Festival, the first fully-staged opera to visit the West Bank.
As an actor, work includes the title roles in Hamlet and Richard II for the RSC, Enron in the West End, the recent TV series Eternal Law and the films Howards End, Van Helsing and three for director Roger Michell: Notting Hill, Persuasion and the forthcoming Hyde Park on Hudson. He also plays the voice of Pongo in Disney’s 101 Dalmations 2.
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TRANSCRIPT OF SAMUEL WEST'S LECTURE
Opening a New Seam: Close the Coalhouse Door in 2012
26th April 2012, Curtis Auditorium, Newcastle University
"My opening text is from a 1935 poem by Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a Worker who Reads. This is the third stanza.
The young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Without even a cook?
George Orwell, in Looking Back on the Spanish War, puts it another way:
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you?
Go to the Durham Mining Museum’s admirable website and you’ll find a long, a very long list of mining disasters, and next to them a roll-call of the dead, where it has been possible to divine their names. There are many thousands of them, particularly between 1850 and 1950 when the Great North Coalfield was at its height; there are many others still unnamed. On the bodies of those men and boys was built the prosperity of an Empire.
There are two things I want to discuss with you today: the political and social history of Close the Coalhouse Door and the dramaturgical process we went through in deciding how to revive it. I hope by the end they’ll become the same thing.
Plays don’t get revived at random. There are reasons why they rise to the surface and demand to be heard. In this case, the catalyst for another outing for Coalhouse was, sadly, the death of Alan Plater in 2010. (When I first typed that sentence I wrote “Aslan Plater”, and it’s true that it is sometimes hard not to see him as the kindly lion, looking on from somewhere other as his good works and good words are followed).
Politically, the play charts the fight for better wages and the revolt of an exploited underclass against their rich paymasters. Quite why it should need to be done now is beyond me. But Max Roberts of Live and Erica Wyman of Northern Stage seemed to think it should; they collaborated on the revival and suggested that Lee Hall might be interested in updating the play. I’m very glad they did. Although the production has been a collaborative effort from start to finish, the prime mover behind the version we now have was Lee. I enjoyed working with him very much and many of the ideas and words which follow come from conversations with him.
I’ve never known a play which belongs so much to its audience as this one. It runs through the North East like rock. We’ve had some good reviews but none pleased me more than this comment from Carl on whatsonstage.com:
‘Not generally a fan of plays, but this, was excellent’.
The original 1968 production famously saw busloads of miners who could only get tickets for the Saturday matinee dressing their best and heading off to the Flora Robson theatre in Jesmond rather than see Newcastle United at home. I suspect Carl may be their natural successor. I’m sorry that whatever plays he’s seen before have turned him off, but delighted that we’ve done our bit to turn him on again.
Not only the town you do it in, but the cultural and political context in which a play is revived is at least as important as the one in which it is set. Close the Coalhouse Door may be a jewel of a play, but it requires a beautiful setting to let it shine as bright as possible. The last Newcastle revival was in 1994, after Michael Heseltine’s precipitate murder of the Great North Coalfield had closed Durham’s last working pit, Wearmouth. Since then Ellington’s gone, and when the company of Coalhouse asked for Paul Younger’s help to go down a working deep mine as part of our research, we discovered that now the nearest one, Maltby in South Yorkshire, is 125 miles away.
But of course other industries, particularly service industries, have grown up in the meantime, and though they don’t breed communities or community spirit, or certainly Unions in the same way, many people make their living in them. There would be (at least we hoped there would be) nineteen-year olds coming to see Coalhouse who weren’t born when Wearmouth closed in 1993. “What’s a miner?” they might well ask. “And why should I care?”
Good questions. The theatre likes good questions. They’re what we do.
There are very good questions about how best to point up a 1968 play from the perspective of 2012, and I’m going to go into them in some detail, since they determined, in large part, the nature of the production.
It’s always a job of detective work, of listening at the walls, to discover what resonances from an original play need emphasis, what can be trusted to be heard, and what may be gone for ever. In one scene where the family wait for news of the eldest son John, trapped underground by a fall of rock, they listen to Radio One, which began broadcasting only a year before. We hear in quick succession references to Basil D’Oliviera, the cricketer whose ban from touring South Africa as a mixed-race member of the English cricket squad began the sporting boycott of that country, to the musical Hair (which as well as much nudity, had a multi-racial cast) and to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, which contains the lyric “the colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people passing by”. The song charted for 29 weeks in 1968; the biggest-selling UK single that year. When John finally reappears, his face smeared with coaldust, he asks ‘what did you expect, the bloody Black and White Minstrel show?’ Clearly Plater is making a plea to see beneath the skin, and it’s a plea that needs to be made in 1968: Geordie in his song has told us he’ll fight “Old Enoch and his colour bar”. Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech on 20th April 1968. It’s only only thirteen years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white passenger and began the largest USA civil rights movement.
Nowadays most of those racial references, even in a world where Basil D’Oliviera recently died, may be lost on us. They’d be lost on no-one in 1968. And there are other resonances that fade just as memories fade. Principally any reviver of this play must deal with the fact that in 1968 - and even in 1994 - there were pits only a few miles from the theatre that were working or only recently closed. There was no sense in ‘68 that the pits were just 25 years from death, and a great deal of anger in 1994 that their end had been hastened so viciously.
We need to work at the stuff that the 1968 version takes as read. The original didn’t need a huge evocation of the working life of the mines - that life was going on just under their feet. In fact, many of those we meet at the party were just happy to have the evening off from it (nowadays, most of them would give anything for a few hours a week back on).
So we have to notice the differences. But the temptation when reviving a play from another time (and lest we forget, 1968 is nearly as close to the First World War as we are to 1968 now) is only to emphasise the similarities. We thought we’d give into that temptation in two places: the first in the words of the song It Couldn’t Happen Here, which for those who haven’t seen the show are a list of reasons why there will never be a revolution in this country, because EVERYTHING’S FINE, do you hear? We imagined at first we would update these lyrics to reflect present inequalities and injustices. Then we looked a bit closer:
MARY: There are no idle rich men now who profit from the poor,
There are no landed gentry shooting grouse upon the moor.
FRANK: There is no exploitation so why should we try to change,
For no one's making thousands playing on the Stock Exchange.
JACKIE: And even in adversity we share an equal role,
Just witness all the stockbrokers a-waiting at the dole.
ALL: So it couldn't happen here, no, it couldn't happen here,
For no one's making thousands so it couldn't happen here.
In the whole song, we changed not one word. No, that’s a lie. In the line
For no one's making thousands playing on the Stock Exchange
we changed “thousands” to “millions”, to reflect inflation.
The second example was in the General Strike sequence, where we debated for a long time on what to put on the placards. Eventually, we chose three slogans that reflected issues that had made the news only in the first three days of the fourth week of rehearsal: the proposed introduction of lower pay for public sector workers in poorer areas, the increase of tax on hot food (principally pasties) and the abolition of the 50p tax rate. Our placards read
No Local Pay Deals
Not a Penny on Food
and
Tax the Rich
which in every case are slogans taken word for word from actual 1926 General Strike banners. Plus ça change.
Believing that it’s important to meet a play head-on, I went back to the notes I made when I first read Close the Coalhouse Door in detail. The first line is:
"Life. Work. Dignity. Magnificence. Drinks.”
And under it, another shopping list - of the four moribund principles that it was important to fire with new life: Unionisation, Revolution, Feminism and Radical religion.
The principle behind Unionisation has been so cheapened and derided recently that it’s good to look at the moment of its birth. This is from Richard Fynes’ classic 1873 work A History of the Northumberland and Durham Miners, and quotes Mr John Tulip, who is addressing a strike meeting at Shadon’s Hill in 1844. You can almost hear the lightbulbs switching on in the men’s heads as they look at each other with a wild surmise and realise that this is the road to progress:
By their great industry, by one man competing with another, and striving how much he could do, they caused the present low rate of wages. Year by year were their wages reduced, and year by year they had worked harder and longer hours in order to make their wages up, but they found this course only added to the evil. They had now got wiser, and they had restricted their labour. This had given great offense to their masters, they were very angry with them for doing this, which plainly showed they were on the right tack. The principal object they had in view when they adopted the restrictive system, was sympathy for their fellow-men.
This eyewitness diary by Maurice Brinton (a pseudonym of Chris Pallis) of Solidarity was written about the events in Paris of May 1968:
The French events have a significance that extends far beyond the frontiers of modern France… Whatever the outcome of the present struggle we must calmly take note of the fact that the political map of Western capitalist society will never be the same again. A whole epoch has just come to an end: the epoch during which people could say, with a semblance of verisimilitude, that 'it couldn't happen here'.
That strain again; it had a dying fall. At least I hope it did.
In mining the seam of religious radicalism through the play we were helped immeasurably by a great speaker meeting with Paul Younger, who told us of The Prims, the primitive Methodists. They believed that if you don’t appreciate the Gospel it’s because either:
a) You’re getting it wrong or
b) You’re rich
For them the radical stuff in the New Testament was transformed into demands:
Get into your teens before you work
Twelve hour days
Education for children and
Libraries
Demands which nowadays no-one would question. Primitive Methodism taught pitmen how to read, and taught them grassroots oratory - they had to learn the bible by heart and speak in public. They had to captivate a tired, cold, illiterate audience, with a terrible attention span. Sounds like good acting training.
Of feminism, and particularly of Lee Hall’s repointing of the character of Ruth, more later.
Alan Plater said in his preface to the first edition of Close the Coalhouse Door: ‘There is no definitive script, nor should there be, for this or any play.’ Nevertheless we had to end somewhere, so I thought I’d say a bit about how Lee Hall and I got to the version we’re performing up the road.
When Lee grew up in Newcastle in the 70s and 80s the cultural hinterland was still just about sustained by mass action. Culture was something you took part in, not just watched. In his case it began through folk music. Other people put their politics into practice through theatre, writing, demonstrating, Union organisation, the club. There was little of the modern separation between life and belief; you expressed your politics in what you did with your friends. This tradition of ordinary people coming together in groups to demand stuff goes back to Chartism and beyond.
Nowadays, Alan Plater’s 1968 might seem a bit general - as if that just happened to be when he wrote it. Not updating it is all very well, but how do we give it specificity, the texture of real life? We asked ourselves a simple question: what what life like in 1968? It seemed like a time of hope and expansion. It was fascinating to hear David Hare on Radio 4 on Monday talking about his new play South Downs, which is set in the early 60s when he was a teenager. He said that the school debates they had then - about the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of private education, even possibly the abolition of advertising - were debates over things that they thought might actually happen, changes that may well come about.
And of course within a few years of the Wilson government of 1964 we did have comprehensive education, legalised abortion, legalised homosexuality, the end of capital punishment and the Pill available to unmarried women. It was an extraordinary rate of change. In the autumn of 1968, we’re only nine months from landing on the Moon.
In going back in time, mostly we chart what was robbed. As the play begins we’ve had twenty years of the National Health Service; twenty years of nationalised coal; Ruth travels to a free university on a nationalised train; calls home on a nationalised phone. In the midst of the celebration, we must remind ourselves that nowadays a nationalised industry is a museum piece. This year it looks like we’ve lost the Royal Mail. I’m a stamp collector, with a standing order at the Philatelic Bureau that goes back decades. I cancelled it last week.
The provocation of 1968 is that the working classes can be political and Socialist. Times may be good, but people in this play - particularly the people celebrating their Golden Wedding - remember when they weren’t. The benefits of 1968 are built on years of struggle. ‘Brave men who did brave things’ is not the play - or not all of it. The problems are knottier than that: education, nationalisation, unsentimentality. “You have to strike”, the play says, “you have to fight, organise, get out of the house”. Success is not guaranteed, it’s contingent and difficult. Nevertheless by 1968, political battles have been won. People feel supported. They are comfortably off and can go to university. Miners are well paid. There is settlement. Worldwide protests against the Vietnam War and revolutionary ferment in Paris have made people feel like citizens of the world, not just citizens of their village. Young people aren’t only interested in shopping. Music is something they play or watch live, not something they download. Above all, people believe in progress, not retrenchment. We wanted to take people back to this time of looking forward, to make the time detailed, living and lovely.
From the first, we knew that the play had to start now, in 2012. Much as we might want to stay in a time before the murder of the industry, we must begin from a place where coal is dead. It’s impossible to read the play now thinking ‘the miners won’. From the perspective of 2012, it’s a full stop. The Unions are eradicated, or nearly. We mustn’t forget that 75% of the coal is still down there, that there are now greener ways of burning it and that collective action isn’t over - in fact a taste for it seems to be making a comeback. The miner’s resistance must be honoured. But we can’t pretend that they won. Or indeed that mining was a perfect existence - it was full of sexist shit, it was dark and dirty and dangerous. Even now, about 12 000 miners die every year worldwide (recorded deaths only - we have almost no data from China). Chile, whose trapped miners we all cheered on recently, has more than 900 mines; it has 18 safety inspectors.
This life has texture and triumph; it also has compromise and crap. But it bred community like few things ever (which is why it had to be got rid of, of course - despite the cheap knock-off David Cameron is trying to sell us, the mining Unions really were the Big Society in action). When you’re down the pit, your life depends on your marra - you’re going to make sure you don’t pick too many fights on your day off. And at the heart of the play lies something extraordinary - people tunneling underground, sometimes many miles out under the sea, to bring back coal, while all around, above and below and beside them are billions of tons of rock and water trying to close the hole they have made, to suffocate and drown and crush them. I couldn’t do it.
We’re looking at the ghost of a community. It haunts us, but in a good way. We must conjure the voice of the ghost from it. The walls have memory; listen to the walls. We must open the coalhouse door. Because the 7-year olds - and the 27 year olds - need to know that it was once different. That there were coal centres, not just call centres. That people worked with their hands and within a group; that they celebrated together.
Perhaps, we thought, there are two spaces - a world of the living and a world of the dead; separated by a barrier (“DO NOT CROSS”?) which is removed. For a while we thought of mining Kantor’s Dead Class, a “theatrical machine of memory” in which characters return to life and are confronted by mannequins of their younger selves. But in the end we decided that was wank.
It was still important to get The First Moment right. The moment embodies a question: how do we represent our past? We needed wit and irony and brevity. At this point Lee told me of a conversation he had with the actor Trevor Fox, who many of you will know. Trevor thought the play should burst through a big poster of Meryl Streep as Thatcher. I nicked it straight away, and I promised to give him credit: here is some. Now the 1984 strike may be the one strike we don’t have to dramatise. Most people know about it. Beginning with an image of The Iron Lady solves two problems - it introduces memories of 1984 and immediately dismisses them by correcting that folk memory in a way that grates. “This is how we reinvent out past”, the poster says. “Nowadays what’s important about a politician is not her policies but her personality.” Tell that to people here.
Then a few lines about what we’re going to do: who it’s by, who wrote the songs, the history of the play. Spoken credits, uninflected. The expert leads us back, and the play enters through Thatcher’s eye, backlit and whistling. If it was a film we’d wind back down the streets of Brockenback: singing, pianos, fires, fragility and complexity. On stage, we jolt back. From now, the present, the theatre. We set up ’68. We put the cakes on.
Plater gives us a Golden Wedding as the McGuffin; an opportunity for exploration and possibility. The first five minutes of 1968 is important; making the home, making the party. There is the care of moments of real life, both emotional care and hope. The Vicar arrives with his hymn board and his violin; Geordie brings beer; Mary makes tea. There will be cake, there will be music, there will be drinking. We are dramatising the communal. The premise and the platform and the party all lend the evening a sense of importance.
Lee and I began by thinking we were going to update the 1994 version, adding a 1984 strike scene to the Ted Heath bit, and even a new song. The Ballad of Neo-Liberalism, we were going to call it. What would it have been like? A song, with arguments between the verses? A song of Destruction? A mash-up of the closures and the new globalised imports, perhaps subtitled Coals to Newcastle? Because if you take a trip down the Tyne, you can see the great big bloody piles of coals brought to Newcastle from Columbia and South Africa and the Ukraine. The UK used about 51 million tonnes of it in 2010, 80% of that in power stations; almost 30% of the UK's electricity still comes from coal. But it’s not British coal, or mostly not. In 2009 the country imported more than twice as much coal as it produced. Coal production is alive and kicking - somewhere else. There are still miners being mistreated - we’ve just outsourced them. There’s still blood inside the coalhouse door, but it’s Columbian blood.
The 1984 song would have pointed out that a dispute which was sold as about economics was really about ideology. That in retrospect it was a crucial watershed - the conservatives winning a supposed industrial dispute was essential as an excuse to usher in neo-liberalism and the privatisation of public resources, to benefit the 1% and the 0.001%, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in today. And we’re still buying coal and a third of electricity is still coal-generated and it comes from elsewhere. And have you looked at your energy bill lately?
And then, quite quickly, we fell out of love with that idea, and asked instead What Time is it Anyway? In 1994, the play was pretty full. By 2012 it’s too full. Continuing the style through Heath, Thatcher and Heseltine is a law of diminishing returns. Agitprop works until 1968. Then it exhausts itself. There’s no poetical rationale in continuing except information. Lee doing a pastiche of Alan Plater’s style would be easy. But where would it get us?
In the first production, 1968 is a very convenient pretext for an Oh What a Lovely War typical family. Now that family is atypical, because historical. The best answer, it seemed to us, is to be firmly in the now at the beginning, and at the end - ensuring that wherever you start is where you finish. And in the middle, make the salty, sexist, infuriating, changing world of 1968 live properly (we also liked the original version because the central love-triangle is explicit and has a good fight in it).
The liminal trick in 1968 is to do what it looks like is going to happen, then smash a truck into it. We make the ironies deliberate. We dramatise the hope. I think this helps solve one of the problems of the play - that the Left got it a bit wrong and that the picture is slightly sentimental. That there could be something a bit nostalgic and conservative about revisiting history in this way. So let’s ironise the nostalgia; invert it; look forward.
Before the final song, the cast articulate what they want the future to look like. How will it look when they’ve won? They can speculate, but they mustn’t know. We imagined doing a song celebrating Jewish life in Berlin in 1924; what would those people look forward to? The last scene of ‘68 is now finely tooled to set up those interruptions and images. (It’s hardly surprising the miners had this hope: the voice-over of Forty Years On, an NCB film unit documentary from 1978, claims "we shall continue to win our essential energy from under the earth, not only for the next 40 years, but for the next 400". A year later Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister.)
Changing the coal centre to the Call Centre was another idea that was too sexy to resist. Miners swapping their helmets for Madonna mikes. A babble of call-centre voice and a lone voice cutting through it. It’s John, who didn’t escape, or get himself a job as an engineer in the great Teesside conurbation. He sings a work song; or a remembered song to keep him happy at work. A lament: miserable truth and beautiful singing.
So a happy ending, a happy company looking forward, then the coda of Coalhouse and the hell and alienation of the call centre. In 1968, the miners are still five years from their greatest triumph: bringing down a government. Waiting is what they do best. Again and again in the play we hear “it’ll take 40 years to win.” Well, it’s now 44 years since 1968, and they lost. In ‘68 it was a lesson about stoicism. Now it’s a lesson about complacency.
This approach is lean and energetic, I hope. It produces something neat and doable that comes out where it goes in and it also allows us to characterise the 2012 bookends, Streep and the call centre, in a way that brings the piece up to date. Lee suggested it was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for Newcastle. We know, at the top of act three of Our Town, that they’re all dead. We don’t need a fourth act.
“We gotta get out of this place”
The abstract artist Victor Pasmore was Head of Painting at Newcastle University from 1954 to 1961. Richard Hamilton joined him there and stayed until 1966. Under Hamilton, Warhol went onto the syllabus. The two movements, abstraction and pop art, were completely incompatible. Frank is Pasmore-Plater. Ruth is Roxy Music (that’s not a random reference; Bryan Ferry, the son of a Washington farmer who kept pit ponies, was also studying art there at the time; the iconoclasm of The Animals and Roxy Music is a magnet that draws people like Frank away from the village).
The play has its nose pressed up against the glass of 1960s Newcastle, and beyond that perhaps America. The social situation is oddly close to Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964), which we read one evening after rehearsal and cross-casts quite well: a well-established working-class family headed by a patriarch, with sons and no daughters, one of whom goes away to university and comes back with his partner, who’s called Ruth. In Coalhouse, Frank brings Ruth from Newcastle. In The Homecoming, Teddy brings Ruth from America. It’s inconceivable that Alan didn’t know the play; how much of Pinter seeped into Plater is fun to guess.
Ruth; the thorn in the side of the play
The most probing ‘keyhole surgery’ Lee did was on the John/Ruth scenes, between the older son who didn’t escape and his younger brother’s girlfriend. Our aim was to sharpen Alan’s love-triangle and to cook up a nicely crunchy problem without demonising anyone.
Without Ruth, the drama would be inert; only a pageant of the past. She isn’t a college-scarf cliché, a posh girl slumming it; Ruth is the future. A young woman in the middle, with somewhere to go socially, she brings into the tiny house a profound other-world view that upsets the North-Eastern political certainties. Despite their adulation of Ellen Wilkinson, people in Brockenback don’t seem to take political women seriously. Let’s make them, we thought. What if Ruth is Sheila Rowbotham, writing a PhD on the roles of women in the working class?
It’s 1968 not 1958; Ruth is almost certainly on the pill, which became available to unmarried women the year before. She and Frank are sleeping with each other but not in her eyes, ‘courting’. That’s too ‘working class’. Ruth’s dilemma in Alan’s original act three, ‘who’s she going to pick?’, is, I confess, not my favourite bit of his writing. It feels a little old-fashioned. Instead we reframed it as, if you’ll excuse the phrase, ‘What the fuck?’ ‘The times are a-changing; who do you think you are telling me who I’m allowed to kiss?’
In 1968 terms, she won’t be had. When she comes on to John it’s not just rejecting Frank, it’s her going after who she likes. In the original, Ruth intimates she could be a pitman’s wife - but we know she isn’t going to be. She may be up for grabs but she’s a PhD student; she’s not going to move into the village. John must leave if he wants to have her. And if having her is a real possibility, that screws John up; his identity is challenged. It gets him out of his apathy - will he leave? John’s choice is much more complicated once she’s appeared. It’s sprung. Whichever way we send him then is exciting.
John’s anger at his own situation comes out as ‘if you’re here you’re going to have to do as you’re told.” But everything on the surface that says “I know what’s what” is undone by the moment of the kiss. Ruth lets him kiss her. We think “oh God he’s kissed the feminist”, but then she’s into it - and he’s shocked. Is she falling for him, or is she wearing the trousers? Is she a tease? In a Pinter world, she would be humiliating him, like in the famous scene in The Homecoming between Lenny and Ruth and the glass of water.
We decided to heighten the fight (which is cut completely in 1994). To John, Frank’s got it all: he’s got out of Brockenback and he’s got the girl (like all good fights, this one is over a girl). John goes for the jugular and punches his little brother down. The fight in the 1968 version is chivalrous - violence in a pitman’s life was usually carefully controlled because he lived under such pressure. We didn’t want a chivalrous fight. Instead, we wanted it angry and uncontrolled, the one point where the duvet of the play won’t go back in the box. And then Ruth’s decision of who to go to when the fight’s done comes from her personal beliefs, not prefigured ones she’s forced to hold because she’s a woman.
After meeting John, Ruth begins to suspect that his brother is ersatz. She likes Frank a lot, but his working class roots are showing. When he goes crazy, in her eyes he becomes much less attractive. Ruth turns his second-hand inherited idea of ownership right back on him, but we may sympathise with the Neanderthal in Frank because Ruth’s being a bit of a flibbertigibbet. Frank and John are both jealous of each other, oddly: one has a future, one has an identity. But to Ruth their macho posturing is a straitjacket - how can they be proud of it? Fall in love with the rough and tumble of working-class life and you realise the sexual politics of it isn’t progressive, it’s a pose. In one of Lee’s neatest new lines, Ruth says to Frank
Just because they treat you like an animal doesn’t mean you have to become one.
In contrast, Frank doesn’t want freedom, he wants security. Is Ruth the first girl he’s slept with? Perhaps. We suspect he wouldn’t mind being engaged within six weeks. Like many educated working-class people, he’s a bit conservative: think miners in suits on Sundays.
And is it real for Ruth? We never know…
The death of the industry
I want to work another seam to its end, and to mine: the story of escape. Lee said to me: “The conflict of the play is not bosses vs. workers. It’s tradition vs. the future. Billy Elliot (getting on the bus) vs. Kes (staying). The sacrifice and violence of John’s journey, set against the freedom of Frank’s.” Should this life be abandoned or not? Sid Chaplain wrote about it all the time. The question was his life.
Lee suggested that the play is really called Close the Coalhouse Door, or the Education of Johnny. “John learns that he should not dismiss the activism and political history” he said, “and also has his knee-jerk sexism challenged into the bargain. He decides to do the "right" thing morally/politcally/culturally but it turns out to be the "wrong" thing historically. That's the message of the play - the people doing the right thing were punished for it.” It’s why we put Sid Chaplin’s poem Miner’s Prayer on the back of the programme. It ends
Lead my bairns intae Thy light,
Let them dae the thing that’s right.
A beautiful sentiment; Sid couldn’t have known how difficult doing the thing that’s right turned out to be.
Finally, after all he’s seen and heard, John decides to stay - the story overpowers him. His duty to his grandparents is too strong, and his honouring of the stories they told him has just saved his life. The terrible irony is that his life is going nowhere; in thirty years, it’s all dead.
Plater’s original is oddly conclusive about the end of the industry. The young people seem to get out too easily. Everyone accepts that it’s being run down, the grandparents wish John godspeed along with Frank, and all live happily ever after, we think. John is stuck on the slag heap at the top of the play and the argument is about him doing the very obvious thing of ‘moving on’. ‘Moving on’, sad as it is, is seen in a very positive light - you can still be working class and acknowledge your history even if you end up doing something else.
In revisiting the play, it’s surely much stronger if John is ambivalent. The ‘mining’s over and a good thing too’ theme starts with the Wilson revolution - the success of Socialism in 1968 means fewer dirty jobs. Nowadays, with manufacturing and mining all but dead, we see those dirty miners as the representatives of Socialism. “We have to be careful to draw mining and Brokenback as a place of hope, solidarity and continuity” said Lee, “so the audience feels the betrayal and sadness when those things are eliminated. If John doesn't believe in them, why should we?”
He put some modernist Labour thinking into the Harold Wilson scene. ‘Growth is what matters’, he says: ‘it doesn’t matter if we get coal from abroad’. In the end, the wheel of fortune, and of history, and of neo-liberalism, is implacable. This seems believable and prescient in ’68, and avoids us having to put the neo-liberal arguments in a scene about Thatcher or Blair.
Overall the change in the debate, tiny but significant, is from Ruth encouraging him to leave and John agreeing, to Ruth wondering if he should stay (and educating him in his own power and possibility if he does) and John being ambivalent. Eventually, John stays. He nails his colours to the mining mast, but we know that in 25 years’ time there’ll be neither colours left nor mast to nail them to. “GET ON THE BLOODY BUS!” we want to shout.
Frank’s path, conversely, is well-trodden - it’s always been a noble thing for the working classes to get their clever kids out of the mines. Dennis Potter, or his Nigel Barton could be Frank. In the 1994 version, Frank and Ruth go back to Jesmond and get on with their postgraduate researches. In ours, we thought Frank had some ambivalence about being a student. In leaving, he’s lost something; he’s dislocated. His postgraduate research is metallurgy. He’s not sure he’s going to finish his PhD. What he wants is a good job. Might he be offered one at the Consett steelworks? So he gets to get on the Titanic as well. We send them both to their deaths because it’s 1968, and we can.
So there we are. A bit of keyhole surgery, another hard look, another sidelong glance, another chapter in the story of an extraordinary play. I’m enormously grateful to have had the chance to revive it in this great city, and with the historic collaboration of these two great theatres. Ours certainly won’t be the last version. Other places will need it to tell other stories, and it will tell those too. But for here, and now, I hope this is a text and a production that’s useful, provocative, and most important of all, a good night out.
Thank you."
Newcastle University
Samuel West is known for both his directing and acting work. His directing credits include The Lady’s Not for Burning (Minerva Chichester), Così fan Tutte (English National Opera), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Bristol Old Vic) and Three Women and a Piano Tuner (Minerva and Hampstead). From 2005 - 2007 Sam was Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, where he directed The Romans in Britain, Insignificance, the European premiere of The Clean House and As You Like It (also RSC). Since then he has directed Dealer’s Choice (Menier Chocolate Factory and Trafalgar Studios), Waste (Almeida), Money (BBC Radio 3) and The Magic Flute for the Palestine Mozart Festival, the first fully-staged opera to visit the West Bank.
As an actor, work includes the title roles in Hamlet and Richard II for the RSC, Enron in the West End, the recent TV series Eternal Law and the films Howards End, Van Helsing and three for director Roger Michell: Notting Hill, Persuasion and the forthcoming Hyde Park on Hudson. He also plays the voice of Pongo in Disney’s 101 Dalmations 2.
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TRANSCRIPT OF SAMUEL WEST'S LECTURE
Opening a New Seam: Close the Coalhouse Door in 2012
26th April 2012, Curtis Auditorium, Newcastle University
"My opening text is from a 1935 poem by Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a Worker who Reads. This is the third stanza.
The young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Without even a cook?
George Orwell, in Looking Back on the Spanish War, puts it another way:
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you?
Go to the Durham Mining Museum’s admirable website and you’ll find a long, a very long list of mining disasters, and next to them a roll-call of the dead, where it has been possible to divine their names. There are many thousands of them, particularly between 1850 and 1950 when the Great North Coalfield was at its height; there are many others still unnamed. On the bodies of those men and boys was built the prosperity of an Empire.
There are two things I want to discuss with you today: the political and social history of Close the Coalhouse Door and the dramaturgical process we went through in deciding how to revive it. I hope by the end they’ll become the same thing.
Plays don’t get revived at random. There are reasons why they rise to the surface and demand to be heard. In this case, the catalyst for another outing for Coalhouse was, sadly, the death of Alan Plater in 2010. (When I first typed that sentence I wrote “Aslan Plater”, and it’s true that it is sometimes hard not to see him as the kindly lion, looking on from somewhere other as his good works and good words are followed).
Politically, the play charts the fight for better wages and the revolt of an exploited underclass against their rich paymasters. Quite why it should need to be done now is beyond me. But Max Roberts of Live and Erica Wyman of Northern Stage seemed to think it should; they collaborated on the revival and suggested that Lee Hall might be interested in updating the play. I’m very glad they did. Although the production has been a collaborative effort from start to finish, the prime mover behind the version we now have was Lee. I enjoyed working with him very much and many of the ideas and words which follow come from conversations with him.
I’ve never known a play which belongs so much to its audience as this one. It runs through the North East like rock. We’ve had some good reviews but none pleased me more than this comment from Carl on whatsonstage.com:
‘Not generally a fan of plays, but this, was excellent’.
The original 1968 production famously saw busloads of miners who could only get tickets for the Saturday matinee dressing their best and heading off to the Flora Robson theatre in Jesmond rather than see Newcastle United at home. I suspect Carl may be their natural successor. I’m sorry that whatever plays he’s seen before have turned him off, but delighted that we’ve done our bit to turn him on again.
Not only the town you do it in, but the cultural and political context in which a play is revived is at least as important as the one in which it is set. Close the Coalhouse Door may be a jewel of a play, but it requires a beautiful setting to let it shine as bright as possible. The last Newcastle revival was in 1994, after Michael Heseltine’s precipitate murder of the Great North Coalfield had closed Durham’s last working pit, Wearmouth. Since then Ellington’s gone, and when the company of Coalhouse asked for Paul Younger’s help to go down a working deep mine as part of our research, we discovered that now the nearest one, Maltby in South Yorkshire, is 125 miles away.
But of course other industries, particularly service industries, have grown up in the meantime, and though they don’t breed communities or community spirit, or certainly Unions in the same way, many people make their living in them. There would be (at least we hoped there would be) nineteen-year olds coming to see Coalhouse who weren’t born when Wearmouth closed in 1993. “What’s a miner?” they might well ask. “And why should I care?”
Good questions. The theatre likes good questions. They’re what we do.
There are very good questions about how best to point up a 1968 play from the perspective of 2012, and I’m going to go into them in some detail, since they determined, in large part, the nature of the production.
It’s always a job of detective work, of listening at the walls, to discover what resonances from an original play need emphasis, what can be trusted to be heard, and what may be gone for ever. In one scene where the family wait for news of the eldest son John, trapped underground by a fall of rock, they listen to Radio One, which began broadcasting only a year before. We hear in quick succession references to Basil D’Oliviera, the cricketer whose ban from touring South Africa as a mixed-race member of the English cricket squad began the sporting boycott of that country, to the musical Hair (which as well as much nudity, had a multi-racial cast) and to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, which contains the lyric “the colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people passing by”. The song charted for 29 weeks in 1968; the biggest-selling UK single that year. When John finally reappears, his face smeared with coaldust, he asks ‘what did you expect, the bloody Black and White Minstrel show?’ Clearly Plater is making a plea to see beneath the skin, and it’s a plea that needs to be made in 1968: Geordie in his song has told us he’ll fight “Old Enoch and his colour bar”. Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech on 20th April 1968. It’s only only thirteen years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white passenger and began the largest USA civil rights movement.
Nowadays most of those racial references, even in a world where Basil D’Oliviera recently died, may be lost on us. They’d be lost on no-one in 1968. And there are other resonances that fade just as memories fade. Principally any reviver of this play must deal with the fact that in 1968 - and even in 1994 - there were pits only a few miles from the theatre that were working or only recently closed. There was no sense in ‘68 that the pits were just 25 years from death, and a great deal of anger in 1994 that their end had been hastened so viciously.
We need to work at the stuff that the 1968 version takes as read. The original didn’t need a huge evocation of the working life of the mines - that life was going on just under their feet. In fact, many of those we meet at the party were just happy to have the evening off from it (nowadays, most of them would give anything for a few hours a week back on).
So we have to notice the differences. But the temptation when reviving a play from another time (and lest we forget, 1968 is nearly as close to the First World War as we are to 1968 now) is only to emphasise the similarities. We thought we’d give into that temptation in two places: the first in the words of the song It Couldn’t Happen Here, which for those who haven’t seen the show are a list of reasons why there will never be a revolution in this country, because EVERYTHING’S FINE, do you hear? We imagined at first we would update these lyrics to reflect present inequalities and injustices. Then we looked a bit closer:
MARY: There are no idle rich men now who profit from the poor,
There are no landed gentry shooting grouse upon the moor.
FRANK: There is no exploitation so why should we try to change,
For no one's making thousands playing on the Stock Exchange.
JACKIE: And even in adversity we share an equal role,
Just witness all the stockbrokers a-waiting at the dole.
ALL: So it couldn't happen here, no, it couldn't happen here,
For no one's making thousands so it couldn't happen here.
In the whole song, we changed not one word. No, that’s a lie. In the line
For no one's making thousands playing on the Stock Exchange
we changed “thousands” to “millions”, to reflect inflation.
The second example was in the General Strike sequence, where we debated for a long time on what to put on the placards. Eventually, we chose three slogans that reflected issues that had made the news only in the first three days of the fourth week of rehearsal: the proposed introduction of lower pay for public sector workers in poorer areas, the increase of tax on hot food (principally pasties) and the abolition of the 50p tax rate. Our placards read
No Local Pay Deals
Not a Penny on Food
and
Tax the Rich
which in every case are slogans taken word for word from actual 1926 General Strike banners. Plus ça change.
Believing that it’s important to meet a play head-on, I went back to the notes I made when I first read Close the Coalhouse Door in detail. The first line is:
"Life. Work. Dignity. Magnificence. Drinks.”
And under it, another shopping list - of the four moribund principles that it was important to fire with new life: Unionisation, Revolution, Feminism and Radical religion.
The principle behind Unionisation has been so cheapened and derided recently that it’s good to look at the moment of its birth. This is from Richard Fynes’ classic 1873 work A History of the Northumberland and Durham Miners, and quotes Mr John Tulip, who is addressing a strike meeting at Shadon’s Hill in 1844. You can almost hear the lightbulbs switching on in the men’s heads as they look at each other with a wild surmise and realise that this is the road to progress:
By their great industry, by one man competing with another, and striving how much he could do, they caused the present low rate of wages. Year by year were their wages reduced, and year by year they had worked harder and longer hours in order to make their wages up, but they found this course only added to the evil. They had now got wiser, and they had restricted their labour. This had given great offense to their masters, they were very angry with them for doing this, which plainly showed they were on the right tack. The principal object they had in view when they adopted the restrictive system, was sympathy for their fellow-men.
This eyewitness diary by Maurice Brinton (a pseudonym of Chris Pallis) of Solidarity was written about the events in Paris of May 1968:
The French events have a significance that extends far beyond the frontiers of modern France… Whatever the outcome of the present struggle we must calmly take note of the fact that the political map of Western capitalist society will never be the same again. A whole epoch has just come to an end: the epoch during which people could say, with a semblance of verisimilitude, that 'it couldn't happen here'.
That strain again; it had a dying fall. At least I hope it did.
In mining the seam of religious radicalism through the play we were helped immeasurably by a great speaker meeting with Paul Younger, who told us of The Prims, the primitive Methodists. They believed that if you don’t appreciate the Gospel it’s because either:
a) You’re getting it wrong or
b) You’re rich
For them the radical stuff in the New Testament was transformed into demands:
Get into your teens before you work
Twelve hour days
Education for children and
Libraries
Demands which nowadays no-one would question. Primitive Methodism taught pitmen how to read, and taught them grassroots oratory - they had to learn the bible by heart and speak in public. They had to captivate a tired, cold, illiterate audience, with a terrible attention span. Sounds like good acting training.
Of feminism, and particularly of Lee Hall’s repointing of the character of Ruth, more later.
Alan Plater said in his preface to the first edition of Close the Coalhouse Door: ‘There is no definitive script, nor should there be, for this or any play.’ Nevertheless we had to end somewhere, so I thought I’d say a bit about how Lee Hall and I got to the version we’re performing up the road.
When Lee grew up in Newcastle in the 70s and 80s the cultural hinterland was still just about sustained by mass action. Culture was something you took part in, not just watched. In his case it began through folk music. Other people put their politics into practice through theatre, writing, demonstrating, Union organisation, the club. There was little of the modern separation between life and belief; you expressed your politics in what you did with your friends. This tradition of ordinary people coming together in groups to demand stuff goes back to Chartism and beyond.
Nowadays, Alan Plater’s 1968 might seem a bit general - as if that just happened to be when he wrote it. Not updating it is all very well, but how do we give it specificity, the texture of real life? We asked ourselves a simple question: what what life like in 1968? It seemed like a time of hope and expansion. It was fascinating to hear David Hare on Radio 4 on Monday talking about his new play South Downs, which is set in the early 60s when he was a teenager. He said that the school debates they had then - about the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of private education, even possibly the abolition of advertising - were debates over things that they thought might actually happen, changes that may well come about.
And of course within a few years of the Wilson government of 1964 we did have comprehensive education, legalised abortion, legalised homosexuality, the end of capital punishment and the Pill available to unmarried women. It was an extraordinary rate of change. In the autumn of 1968, we’re only nine months from landing on the Moon.
In going back in time, mostly we chart what was robbed. As the play begins we’ve had twenty years of the National Health Service; twenty years of nationalised coal; Ruth travels to a free university on a nationalised train; calls home on a nationalised phone. In the midst of the celebration, we must remind ourselves that nowadays a nationalised industry is a museum piece. This year it looks like we’ve lost the Royal Mail. I’m a stamp collector, with a standing order at the Philatelic Bureau that goes back decades. I cancelled it last week.
The provocation of 1968 is that the working classes can be political and Socialist. Times may be good, but people in this play - particularly the people celebrating their Golden Wedding - remember when they weren’t. The benefits of 1968 are built on years of struggle. ‘Brave men who did brave things’ is not the play - or not all of it. The problems are knottier than that: education, nationalisation, unsentimentality. “You have to strike”, the play says, “you have to fight, organise, get out of the house”. Success is not guaranteed, it’s contingent and difficult. Nevertheless by 1968, political battles have been won. People feel supported. They are comfortably off and can go to university. Miners are well paid. There is settlement. Worldwide protests against the Vietnam War and revolutionary ferment in Paris have made people feel like citizens of the world, not just citizens of their village. Young people aren’t only interested in shopping. Music is something they play or watch live, not something they download. Above all, people believe in progress, not retrenchment. We wanted to take people back to this time of looking forward, to make the time detailed, living and lovely.
From the first, we knew that the play had to start now, in 2012. Much as we might want to stay in a time before the murder of the industry, we must begin from a place where coal is dead. It’s impossible to read the play now thinking ‘the miners won’. From the perspective of 2012, it’s a full stop. The Unions are eradicated, or nearly. We mustn’t forget that 75% of the coal is still down there, that there are now greener ways of burning it and that collective action isn’t over - in fact a taste for it seems to be making a comeback. The miner’s resistance must be honoured. But we can’t pretend that they won. Or indeed that mining was a perfect existence - it was full of sexist shit, it was dark and dirty and dangerous. Even now, about 12 000 miners die every year worldwide (recorded deaths only - we have almost no data from China). Chile, whose trapped miners we all cheered on recently, has more than 900 mines; it has 18 safety inspectors.
This life has texture and triumph; it also has compromise and crap. But it bred community like few things ever (which is why it had to be got rid of, of course - despite the cheap knock-off David Cameron is trying to sell us, the mining Unions really were the Big Society in action). When you’re down the pit, your life depends on your marra - you’re going to make sure you don’t pick too many fights on your day off. And at the heart of the play lies something extraordinary - people tunneling underground, sometimes many miles out under the sea, to bring back coal, while all around, above and below and beside them are billions of tons of rock and water trying to close the hole they have made, to suffocate and drown and crush them. I couldn’t do it.
We’re looking at the ghost of a community. It haunts us, but in a good way. We must conjure the voice of the ghost from it. The walls have memory; listen to the walls. We must open the coalhouse door. Because the 7-year olds - and the 27 year olds - need to know that it was once different. That there were coal centres, not just call centres. That people worked with their hands and within a group; that they celebrated together.
Perhaps, we thought, there are two spaces - a world of the living and a world of the dead; separated by a barrier (“DO NOT CROSS”?) which is removed. For a while we thought of mining Kantor’s Dead Class, a “theatrical machine of memory” in which characters return to life and are confronted by mannequins of their younger selves. But in the end we decided that was wank.
It was still important to get The First Moment right. The moment embodies a question: how do we represent our past? We needed wit and irony and brevity. At this point Lee told me of a conversation he had with the actor Trevor Fox, who many of you will know. Trevor thought the play should burst through a big poster of Meryl Streep as Thatcher. I nicked it straight away, and I promised to give him credit: here is some. Now the 1984 strike may be the one strike we don’t have to dramatise. Most people know about it. Beginning with an image of The Iron Lady solves two problems - it introduces memories of 1984 and immediately dismisses them by correcting that folk memory in a way that grates. “This is how we reinvent out past”, the poster says. “Nowadays what’s important about a politician is not her policies but her personality.” Tell that to people here.
Then a few lines about what we’re going to do: who it’s by, who wrote the songs, the history of the play. Spoken credits, uninflected. The expert leads us back, and the play enters through Thatcher’s eye, backlit and whistling. If it was a film we’d wind back down the streets of Brockenback: singing, pianos, fires, fragility and complexity. On stage, we jolt back. From now, the present, the theatre. We set up ’68. We put the cakes on.
Plater gives us a Golden Wedding as the McGuffin; an opportunity for exploration and possibility. The first five minutes of 1968 is important; making the home, making the party. There is the care of moments of real life, both emotional care and hope. The Vicar arrives with his hymn board and his violin; Geordie brings beer; Mary makes tea. There will be cake, there will be music, there will be drinking. We are dramatising the communal. The premise and the platform and the party all lend the evening a sense of importance.
Lee and I began by thinking we were going to update the 1994 version, adding a 1984 strike scene to the Ted Heath bit, and even a new song. The Ballad of Neo-Liberalism, we were going to call it. What would it have been like? A song, with arguments between the verses? A song of Destruction? A mash-up of the closures and the new globalised imports, perhaps subtitled Coals to Newcastle? Because if you take a trip down the Tyne, you can see the great big bloody piles of coals brought to Newcastle from Columbia and South Africa and the Ukraine. The UK used about 51 million tonnes of it in 2010, 80% of that in power stations; almost 30% of the UK's electricity still comes from coal. But it’s not British coal, or mostly not. In 2009 the country imported more than twice as much coal as it produced. Coal production is alive and kicking - somewhere else. There are still miners being mistreated - we’ve just outsourced them. There’s still blood inside the coalhouse door, but it’s Columbian blood.
The 1984 song would have pointed out that a dispute which was sold as about economics was really about ideology. That in retrospect it was a crucial watershed - the conservatives winning a supposed industrial dispute was essential as an excuse to usher in neo-liberalism and the privatisation of public resources, to benefit the 1% and the 0.001%, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in today. And we’re still buying coal and a third of electricity is still coal-generated and it comes from elsewhere. And have you looked at your energy bill lately?
And then, quite quickly, we fell out of love with that idea, and asked instead What Time is it Anyway? In 1994, the play was pretty full. By 2012 it’s too full. Continuing the style through Heath, Thatcher and Heseltine is a law of diminishing returns. Agitprop works until 1968. Then it exhausts itself. There’s no poetical rationale in continuing except information. Lee doing a pastiche of Alan Plater’s style would be easy. But where would it get us?
In the first production, 1968 is a very convenient pretext for an Oh What a Lovely War typical family. Now that family is atypical, because historical. The best answer, it seemed to us, is to be firmly in the now at the beginning, and at the end - ensuring that wherever you start is where you finish. And in the middle, make the salty, sexist, infuriating, changing world of 1968 live properly (we also liked the original version because the central love-triangle is explicit and has a good fight in it).
The liminal trick in 1968 is to do what it looks like is going to happen, then smash a truck into it. We make the ironies deliberate. We dramatise the hope. I think this helps solve one of the problems of the play - that the Left got it a bit wrong and that the picture is slightly sentimental. That there could be something a bit nostalgic and conservative about revisiting history in this way. So let’s ironise the nostalgia; invert it; look forward.
Before the final song, the cast articulate what they want the future to look like. How will it look when they’ve won? They can speculate, but they mustn’t know. We imagined doing a song celebrating Jewish life in Berlin in 1924; what would those people look forward to? The last scene of ‘68 is now finely tooled to set up those interruptions and images. (It’s hardly surprising the miners had this hope: the voice-over of Forty Years On, an NCB film unit documentary from 1978, claims "we shall continue to win our essential energy from under the earth, not only for the next 40 years, but for the next 400". A year later Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister.)
Changing the coal centre to the Call Centre was another idea that was too sexy to resist. Miners swapping their helmets for Madonna mikes. A babble of call-centre voice and a lone voice cutting through it. It’s John, who didn’t escape, or get himself a job as an engineer in the great Teesside conurbation. He sings a work song; or a remembered song to keep him happy at work. A lament: miserable truth and beautiful singing.
So a happy ending, a happy company looking forward, then the coda of Coalhouse and the hell and alienation of the call centre. In 1968, the miners are still five years from their greatest triumph: bringing down a government. Waiting is what they do best. Again and again in the play we hear “it’ll take 40 years to win.” Well, it’s now 44 years since 1968, and they lost. In ‘68 it was a lesson about stoicism. Now it’s a lesson about complacency.
This approach is lean and energetic, I hope. It produces something neat and doable that comes out where it goes in and it also allows us to characterise the 2012 bookends, Streep and the call centre, in a way that brings the piece up to date. Lee suggested it was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for Newcastle. We know, at the top of act three of Our Town, that they’re all dead. We don’t need a fourth act.
“We gotta get out of this place”
The abstract artist Victor Pasmore was Head of Painting at Newcastle University from 1954 to 1961. Richard Hamilton joined him there and stayed until 1966. Under Hamilton, Warhol went onto the syllabus. The two movements, abstraction and pop art, were completely incompatible. Frank is Pasmore-Plater. Ruth is Roxy Music (that’s not a random reference; Bryan Ferry, the son of a Washington farmer who kept pit ponies, was also studying art there at the time; the iconoclasm of The Animals and Roxy Music is a magnet that draws people like Frank away from the village).
The play has its nose pressed up against the glass of 1960s Newcastle, and beyond that perhaps America. The social situation is oddly close to Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964), which we read one evening after rehearsal and cross-casts quite well: a well-established working-class family headed by a patriarch, with sons and no daughters, one of whom goes away to university and comes back with his partner, who’s called Ruth. In Coalhouse, Frank brings Ruth from Newcastle. In The Homecoming, Teddy brings Ruth from America. It’s inconceivable that Alan didn’t know the play; how much of Pinter seeped into Plater is fun to guess.
Ruth; the thorn in the side of the play
The most probing ‘keyhole surgery’ Lee did was on the John/Ruth scenes, between the older son who didn’t escape and his younger brother’s girlfriend. Our aim was to sharpen Alan’s love-triangle and to cook up a nicely crunchy problem without demonising anyone.
Without Ruth, the drama would be inert; only a pageant of the past. She isn’t a college-scarf cliché, a posh girl slumming it; Ruth is the future. A young woman in the middle, with somewhere to go socially, she brings into the tiny house a profound other-world view that upsets the North-Eastern political certainties. Despite their adulation of Ellen Wilkinson, people in Brockenback don’t seem to take political women seriously. Let’s make them, we thought. What if Ruth is Sheila Rowbotham, writing a PhD on the roles of women in the working class?
It’s 1968 not 1958; Ruth is almost certainly on the pill, which became available to unmarried women the year before. She and Frank are sleeping with each other but not in her eyes, ‘courting’. That’s too ‘working class’. Ruth’s dilemma in Alan’s original act three, ‘who’s she going to pick?’, is, I confess, not my favourite bit of his writing. It feels a little old-fashioned. Instead we reframed it as, if you’ll excuse the phrase, ‘What the fuck?’ ‘The times are a-changing; who do you think you are telling me who I’m allowed to kiss?’
In 1968 terms, she won’t be had. When she comes on to John it’s not just rejecting Frank, it’s her going after who she likes. In the original, Ruth intimates she could be a pitman’s wife - but we know she isn’t going to be. She may be up for grabs but she’s a PhD student; she’s not going to move into the village. John must leave if he wants to have her. And if having her is a real possibility, that screws John up; his identity is challenged. It gets him out of his apathy - will he leave? John’s choice is much more complicated once she’s appeared. It’s sprung. Whichever way we send him then is exciting.
John’s anger at his own situation comes out as ‘if you’re here you’re going to have to do as you’re told.” But everything on the surface that says “I know what’s what” is undone by the moment of the kiss. Ruth lets him kiss her. We think “oh God he’s kissed the feminist”, but then she’s into it - and he’s shocked. Is she falling for him, or is she wearing the trousers? Is she a tease? In a Pinter world, she would be humiliating him, like in the famous scene in The Homecoming between Lenny and Ruth and the glass of water.
We decided to heighten the fight (which is cut completely in 1994). To John, Frank’s got it all: he’s got out of Brockenback and he’s got the girl (like all good fights, this one is over a girl). John goes for the jugular and punches his little brother down. The fight in the 1968 version is chivalrous - violence in a pitman’s life was usually carefully controlled because he lived under such pressure. We didn’t want a chivalrous fight. Instead, we wanted it angry and uncontrolled, the one point where the duvet of the play won’t go back in the box. And then Ruth’s decision of who to go to when the fight’s done comes from her personal beliefs, not prefigured ones she’s forced to hold because she’s a woman.
After meeting John, Ruth begins to suspect that his brother is ersatz. She likes Frank a lot, but his working class roots are showing. When he goes crazy, in her eyes he becomes much less attractive. Ruth turns his second-hand inherited idea of ownership right back on him, but we may sympathise with the Neanderthal in Frank because Ruth’s being a bit of a flibbertigibbet. Frank and John are both jealous of each other, oddly: one has a future, one has an identity. But to Ruth their macho posturing is a straitjacket - how can they be proud of it? Fall in love with the rough and tumble of working-class life and you realise the sexual politics of it isn’t progressive, it’s a pose. In one of Lee’s neatest new lines, Ruth says to Frank
Just because they treat you like an animal doesn’t mean you have to become one.
In contrast, Frank doesn’t want freedom, he wants security. Is Ruth the first girl he’s slept with? Perhaps. We suspect he wouldn’t mind being engaged within six weeks. Like many educated working-class people, he’s a bit conservative: think miners in suits on Sundays.
And is it real for Ruth? We never know…
The death of the industry
I want to work another seam to its end, and to mine: the story of escape. Lee said to me: “The conflict of the play is not bosses vs. workers. It’s tradition vs. the future. Billy Elliot (getting on the bus) vs. Kes (staying). The sacrifice and violence of John’s journey, set against the freedom of Frank’s.” Should this life be abandoned or not? Sid Chaplain wrote about it all the time. The question was his life.
Lee suggested that the play is really called Close the Coalhouse Door, or the Education of Johnny. “John learns that he should not dismiss the activism and political history” he said, “and also has his knee-jerk sexism challenged into the bargain. He decides to do the "right" thing morally/politcally/culturally but it turns out to be the "wrong" thing historically. That's the message of the play - the people doing the right thing were punished for it.” It’s why we put Sid Chaplin’s poem Miner’s Prayer on the back of the programme. It ends
Lead my bairns intae Thy light,
Let them dae the thing that’s right.
A beautiful sentiment; Sid couldn’t have known how difficult doing the thing that’s right turned out to be.
Finally, after all he’s seen and heard, John decides to stay - the story overpowers him. His duty to his grandparents is too strong, and his honouring of the stories they told him has just saved his life. The terrible irony is that his life is going nowhere; in thirty years, it’s all dead.
Plater’s original is oddly conclusive about the end of the industry. The young people seem to get out too easily. Everyone accepts that it’s being run down, the grandparents wish John godspeed along with Frank, and all live happily ever after, we think. John is stuck on the slag heap at the top of the play and the argument is about him doing the very obvious thing of ‘moving on’. ‘Moving on’, sad as it is, is seen in a very positive light - you can still be working class and acknowledge your history even if you end up doing something else.
In revisiting the play, it’s surely much stronger if John is ambivalent. The ‘mining’s over and a good thing too’ theme starts with the Wilson revolution - the success of Socialism in 1968 means fewer dirty jobs. Nowadays, with manufacturing and mining all but dead, we see those dirty miners as the representatives of Socialism. “We have to be careful to draw mining and Brokenback as a place of hope, solidarity and continuity” said Lee, “so the audience feels the betrayal and sadness when those things are eliminated. If John doesn't believe in them, why should we?”
He put some modernist Labour thinking into the Harold Wilson scene. ‘Growth is what matters’, he says: ‘it doesn’t matter if we get coal from abroad’. In the end, the wheel of fortune, and of history, and of neo-liberalism, is implacable. This seems believable and prescient in ’68, and avoids us having to put the neo-liberal arguments in a scene about Thatcher or Blair.
Overall the change in the debate, tiny but significant, is from Ruth encouraging him to leave and John agreeing, to Ruth wondering if he should stay (and educating him in his own power and possibility if he does) and John being ambivalent. Eventually, John stays. He nails his colours to the mining mast, but we know that in 25 years’ time there’ll be neither colours left nor mast to nail them to. “GET ON THE BLOODY BUS!” we want to shout.
Frank’s path, conversely, is well-trodden - it’s always been a noble thing for the working classes to get their clever kids out of the mines. Dennis Potter, or his Nigel Barton could be Frank. In the 1994 version, Frank and Ruth go back to Jesmond and get on with their postgraduate researches. In ours, we thought Frank had some ambivalence about being a student. In leaving, he’s lost something; he’s dislocated. His postgraduate research is metallurgy. He’s not sure he’s going to finish his PhD. What he wants is a good job. Might he be offered one at the Consett steelworks? So he gets to get on the Titanic as well. We send them both to their deaths because it’s 1968, and we can.
So there we are. A bit of keyhole surgery, another hard look, another sidelong glance, another chapter in the story of an extraordinary play. I’m enormously grateful to have had the chance to revive it in this great city, and with the historic collaboration of these two great theatres. Ours certainly won’t be the last version. Other places will need it to tell other stories, and it will tell those too. But for here, and now, I hope this is a text and a production that’s useful, provocative, and most important of all, a good night out.
Thank you."
Newcastle University
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