Newcastle revives Alan Plater's 'Close the Coalhouse Door'

Posted by

Alan Sykes

Thursday 12 April 2012

Big audiences expected for Sam West and Lee Hall's version of the classic which had to have its run extended five times when miners packed it out in 1968. Alan Sykes has bought tickets.

Chris Conel sings the title song in rehearsals for Close the Coalhouse Door.
It's on the English A-level syllabus these days. Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage

 





Samuel West in rehearsals for the new production.
Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage



For the original Newcastle Playhouse production of "Close the Coalhouse Door" in 1968, bus loads of miners would come in from the pit villages of County Durham and Northumberland, and forced the play's run to be extended five times. It was written by Alan Plater, based on his friend and mentor Sid Chaplin's mining stories, and with music by Alex Glasgow – all three of them born in the County Durham mining area.

Samuel West, who is directing the new version which opens at Northern Stage this Friday, thinks its popularity back then was partly because

in 1968 people in the North East hadn't seen themselves on stage very much and it spoke to them in their own language and with song and humour and it spoke to them about something they cared about and that ran through them like rock.

Adam Barlow rehearsing; not as relaxing
 a play as it looks.
Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage

This time round the popularity (and the production is already not far from a sell-out in Newcastle) is likely to be caused by a mixture of local pride tinged with nostalgia. There is no doubt that there is an audience – Live Theatre's 2007 production of Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters was originally only supposed to run for six weeks, and, after two runs at the National Theatre, is still playing in London's West End, as well as having clocked up tours to the rest of England, Broadway and, in a Spanish version called "Mineros", is on at the Metropolitan Theatre in Buenas Aires.

Previous revivals of "Close the Coalhouse Door" had been updated by Plater himself – for the Leeds version of 1974 he remembered doing some of the re-writes by candlelight during a power-cut caused by the three day week. However, because of Plater's death in 2010, Lee Hall was set the task of bringing the version up to date, including references to the miners' strike of 1984-5. As a close friend and protégé of Alan Plater's, he stressed that the adaptations he has made are like "keyhole surgery" –

I didn't want to write Lee Hall's version of this. I'm not trying to impose anything because I was really trying to think "what would Alan do? What would Alan do?"

In the Bloodaxe Books edition of the play, Plater wrote

 The soul of the piece is unchanging. We originally described it as "a hymn of unqualified praise to the miners – who created a revolutionary weapon without having a revolutionary intent." If, today, the hymn is more in the nature of an elegy, it is a strain that haunts the dreams of everyone with roots in the North East.



A final peep at rehearsals: Tarek Merchant.



As well as being elegiac it is, like most of Plater's work, richly humorous - Max Roberts, Live Theatre's artistic director and director of the play's 1994 revival, and of many of Plater's other works, says of him: "All the scripts I directed possessed a delightful anarchy along with a genuine, heartfelt, humanist concern. I truly believe he was one of the finest comic writers of the 20th Century".

Alan Plater's Close the Coalhouse Door is co-produced by Live Theatre and Northern Stage. It runs in Newcastle, Richmond (Surrey), Salford, Huddersfield, Guildford, Durham, Oxford and York, until June 30th.

Keith Pattison's No Redemption exhibition of photographs of the 1984-5 miners' strike accompanies the play in Newcastle.

The Guardian