Close The Coalhouse Door, Salford Lowry

Close The Coalhouse Door, Salford Lowry

Northern Stage- Live Theatre production of CLOSE THE COAL HOUSE DOOR by Alan Plater directed by Sam West

Published on Tuesday 5 June 2012 10:42

There’s nothing wrong with reviving Alan Plater’s tragi-comic musical play on coal mining, particularly when it provides the history lessons we all failed to learn from the industry’s past.

The closing hymn is as much a comment on the state we now find ourselves in, as it is the 200 years of a coal-fired power struggle amongst the mining communities of the North East.
A joint production between Newcastle’s Northern Stage and Live Theatre production houses, it is soaked in regional accents and miners folklore - and all the jokes which killed variety theatre.
Originally conceived in 1968, it borrows something of the style of Oh What a Lovely War to raise consciousness over the plight of the miner in the same way Joan Littlewood’s earlier work did for the British Tommy.
The main drawback is that the play itself - much like its subject - is now a period piece, even with the updated material provided by Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall.
In its style and even performance, directed here by Sam West, at best it all looks like a halting re-creation of the type of agit-prop theatre that once toured the workingmen’s clubs.
Mixing up drama, music hall, politics and a history lesson demands nimble and highly-choreographed performances, not the take-it-or-leave-it portrayals on display here.
There’s certainly no sense of anybody’s passion for the story they are imparting.
Maybe at the point that the miners’ struggle was updated for the years 1968 to 1984, the whole play could have been trimmed and re-worked over two much snappier acts. As it is there’s just too much to digest in a play that from the outset admits it trades on irony, ambivalence and contradiction. Or does it?

by DAVID UPTON