Close the Coalhouse Door
Labels: Theatre
From Jean Richards, theatre editor
‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, now showing at York Theatre Royal, is a roller-coaster ride through two hundred years of mining history in County Durham, in the words of those who were there, and those who talked about it afterwards.
A family gathers to celebrate the grandparents’ golden wedding: two warring grandsons, a feminist student girlfriend, pitmen (not ‘miners’, we are told), friends, neighbours, and the local vicar (but no children of the anniversary couple, their one son dead in a mining accident and his wife of lung disease). A cast of nine in all, they laugh and joke, sing and dance, tell stories and play silly games, and gradually unfold a story of poverty, oppression, near starvation, infant mortality, back-breaking labour in inhuman conditions, and death underground.
The play was written by the late Alan Plater, with music by Alex Glasgow, and was first staged in 1968. This production, by Northern Stage and Live Theatre, has up-dated the story somewhat, suggesting that the benefits of nationalization were illusory, but only a huge poster for the film on Margaret Thatcher’s life, ‘The Iron Lady’, hints at the disaster to come.
Coal mining is unusual, perhaps unique, in British post industrial society in having been so brutal yet its loss is now so mourned. The title? The song says it all: “close the coalhouse door, lads, there’s blood inside”. But you leave the theatre with the impression of having had a jolly evening!
‘Close the Coalhouse Door’ runs at the York Theatre Royal until Saturday, tickets may be booked here.
‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, now showing at York Theatre Royal, is a roller-coaster ride through two hundred years of mining history in County Durham, in the words of those who were there, and those who talked about it afterwards.
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| (Courtesy of York Theatre Royal) |
A family gathers to celebrate the grandparents’ golden wedding: two warring grandsons, a feminist student girlfriend, pitmen (not ‘miners’, we are told), friends, neighbours, and the local vicar (but no children of the anniversary couple, their one son dead in a mining accident and his wife of lung disease). A cast of nine in all, they laugh and joke, sing and dance, tell stories and play silly games, and gradually unfold a story of poverty, oppression, near starvation, infant mortality, back-breaking labour in inhuman conditions, and death underground.
The play was written by the late Alan Plater, with music by Alex Glasgow, and was first staged in 1968. This production, by Northern Stage and Live Theatre, has up-dated the story somewhat, suggesting that the benefits of nationalization were illusory, but only a huge poster for the film on Margaret Thatcher’s life, ‘The Iron Lady’, hints at the disaster to come.
Coal mining is unusual, perhaps unique, in British post industrial society in having been so brutal yet its loss is now so mourned. The title? The song says it all: “close the coalhouse door, lads, there’s blood inside”. But you leave the theatre with the impression of having had a jolly evening!
‘Close the Coalhouse Door’ runs at the York Theatre Royal until Saturday, tickets may be booked here.
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