Radio review: Close the Coalhouse Door; Hard Boiled Eggs and Nuts; Don’t Start

By:

Moira Petty

 

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

 

 

When Lee Hall was called upon to update Close the Coalhouse Door, his mentor Alan Plater’s 1968 theatrical history of coal mining in the north-east, he announced with due reverence and sensitivity that it was a matter of “keyhole surgery”.
The original run of the docudrama had become a legend in Newcastle, being extended five times and attracting, among others, coach loads of miners. This may explain why those preparing its spring 2012 revival – a Northern Stage co-production with Live Theatre – seemed to tiptoe around the original text as if it were some holy edict.
Now that Samuel West’s new stage production has been adapted for radio, I only wish Hall had sharpened his knives and come at it with the instincts of a butcher. Based on stories told to Plater by Sid Chaplin and underpinned by Alex Glasgow’s glorious songs, the drama interleaves set pieces depicting the pitmen’s political struggles since 1831, when trade unions were set up, with scenes from a golden wedding party at a Geordie home in 1968. The righteous agitprop, while disinterring bruising statistics about mine owners who treated men – and boys as young as six – with callous indifference, sits uncomfortably beside the family story that does not have the space to move beyond cliches.
Written in the wake of kitchen sink drama, Plater’s play throws in everything including the kitchen sink. It’s a bit Brechtian, a bit surrealist and a bit JB Priestley, in what could be retitled A Feminist Calls, as the family’s university-educated son brings home his politically aware girlfriend, who turns up her nose at the other son – an unreconstructed miner – then makes a play for him. I loved the arrival of Harold Wilson and other 1960s politicians in the family’s living room to explain why coal will soon be as old hat as music hall, but much of the play’s structure seems lifeless and its components jar.
Hall’s contributions, though, grafted on to the beginning and end, are dazzlingly inventive. They include a sardonic skip through the political landscape of the past 40 years and an epilogue in which Tyneside workers now toil in a call centre, hinting at how much further Hall could have gone.
The adaptation to radio is wittily done, with scenery and setting transposed into words and the actors talking of coming to the studio. It features the stage production’s original all-singing, all-dancing cast, including Tarek Merchant as our guide, the Expert, and Paul Woodson, Jack Wilkinson and Louisa Farrant as the love triangle. Glasgow’s songs remain timeless and elegiac, with the lament of folk music and the caper of music hall.
Vaudeville made Stan Laurel the performer the world later acclaimed in his films with Oliver Hardy. With five marriages, a doleful onscreen persona that won hearts, and a career that took him across the Atlantic to work in a stage troupe with Charlie Chaplin before entering movies during the silent era, his life has been the stuff of several radio plays.
Colin Hough’s Hard Boiled Eggs and Nuts takes us back to the 16 year-old Arthur Stanley Jefferson (James Anthony Pearson, hinting at Laurel without parody), whose relationship with his invalid mother, Madge (Alexandra Mathie, spirited and humorous), was pivotal. Their scenes with the whiskery, doom-laden nurse (Ann Louise Ross) reach a delicious comic pitch.
Talking of which, Frank Skinner’s Don’t Start – his duologues about a couple who revel in arguments rich in intellectual one-upmanship, puns and verbal slapstick worthy of vaudeville – has just completed a second series. Katherine Parkinson is delightfully acidic opposite Skinner’s inventively comedic other half. Is it possible that it is more delightfully funny than ever?

Close the Coalhouse Door, R4, Saturday, September 29
Hard Boiled Eggs and Nuts, R4, Friday, September 28
Don’t Start, R4, Wednesday, October 3

Close the Coalhouse Door – Oxford Playhouse

Close the Coalhouse Door – Oxford Playhouse

VN:F [1.9.14_1148]

June 20th, 2012

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Writer: Alan Plater with additional material by Lee Hall, based on stories by Sid Chaplin

Music: Alex Glasgow

Director: Samuel West

Reviewer: Mary Tapper

The Public Reviews Rating:

A history lesson, a comedy, a drama, a musical, a damning political statement – Close the Coalhouse Door is all of these things and more. Add in to the mixture a completely barmy sense of humour and extremely talented musician and actors and you have a wonderfully heady mixture that delights and surprises.
The revolving set is cleverly designed by Soutra Gilmour as a mining family house in 1968 and we are treated to reminiscences as a family celebrate the Grandfather and Grandmother’s golden wedding anniversary. The storytelling takes us back to 1832 to see how patient miners had to be to improve conditions in the mines, with 40 years of campaigns and strikes before significant action was taken. While older members of the household tell us the history of the efforts, we are also shown the reality of life in 1968 – two brothers at each others throats as one returns home with girlfriend in tow, the other resentful and bitter, having stayed behind to work down the mine. These two parallel themes of history and “ the present day” of 1968 are cleverly interwoven throughout the evening and the dual narrative works very effectively adding dramatic interest and asking new questions of the next generation.
After the first interval we look at how things develop between the World Wars and the quirky comedy writing really comes to the fore as the pace ratchets up…. it is a job to keep up with switches of character and sheer zaniness, but always a pleasure, as we are swept along in the sheer madness and speed of the production! All the actors perform well but without a doubt Jane Holman, as Mary, steals the show – whenever she is on stage she draws the eye and her enthusiasm, versatility and acting skills are a pleasure to behold. With no weak links amongst them, members of the cast all play multiple roles, as history appears before our very eyes, inviting interest and producing moments of great humour.
In act three we are shown how, amongst others, Harold Wilson influenced what happened to the coal mining industry and then we are skilfully swept along to the present day with a dramatic updating of history, rich in irony and sarcasm, never straying into maudlin territory and always packing a great punch.
Costumes and set are excellent and with stirring songs and creative musical accompaniment from the cast there is much to admire. My one reservation is that it takes a few minutes to tune into all the accents right at the start of the show, as the dialogue races along, but this is a small quibble in an otherwise highly successful evening. Lighting is beautifully planned and adds pathos and atmosphere to the production, with areas of the stage being picked out for emphasis, and mining lamps and a standard lamp just two small devices cleverly used. The programme provides good background history on the mining industry and its key figures and is recommended.
Music is a delight with excellent singing and sound levels well set. The cast sing both individually and as a group, where they create skilful harmonies, singing with force and passion to create moving anthems. The songs stick in the mind, particularly the rather haunting Close the Coalhouse Door that repeats throughout the evening.
As the music from the last song fades and pictures of closed mines are projected onto a desolate abandoned house it is hard not to feel stirred and moved by the evening. Delivered with good humour and wit this story has far more effect on us that if it were told in a preaching tone. It wins us over with its sarcasm and knowing looks, its asides and bad jokes, until we believe every word of the tale and admire the zeal and guts of the fight, even if it is ultimately in vain. Passionate and full of life. Recommended.

Runs until 23rd June and touring.

Picture: Keith Pattison

The Public Review

Play mines a rich vein of Plater wit

Monday, June 18, 2012

Close The Coalhouse Door, by the Hull-raised dramatist Alan Plater, attracted busloads of miners when it was first staged in the 1960s.
The initial run – telling of the history of mining in the North East – was extended five times at its Newcastle run to cope with the numbers of visiting pitmen.

Given that heritage, it is little wonder director Samuel West felt a nagging concern when he began casting for this production.
"I was apprehensive," Samuel said. "Finding people to populate a play with a strong sense of place and music at its heart was always going to involve a big search.
"The shopping list of skills we needed was long: native or convincing Geordies who can sing, move, tour and play at least one musical instrument."
Most important, Samuel said, was to find those with the "talent and the wit" to serve the words of Alan Plater and Sid Chaplin – whose stories inspired the play.
He needn't have worried: "People came in with songs and speeches that showed they had this play in their blood."
The musical play – co-produced by Live Theatre and Northern Stage – is being performed at York Theatre Royal next week.
Featuring songs by Alex Glasgow, inspired by the folk music of the North East, the drama charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831.
Previous revivals had been updated by Alan, who was born in Tyneside. After his death in 2010, Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall took over, including references to the miners' strike of 1984-85 for this latest production.
In a published edition of the play, Alan described it as a "hymn of unqualified praise to the miners". He wrote: "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."

Hull and East Riding

 

Close the Coalhouse Door, Richmond Theatre - review

Fiery music and politics in Lee Hall's reworking of this poignant portrait of pit life

Stoic: Thomas (Nicholas Lumley)

10 May 2012

Lee Hall, via Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, has done more than most to edge coalmining into the cultural consciousness. It’s fitting, therefore, that he should provide additional material, most strikingly via a poignant end note, for this revival of Alan Plater’s passionate, angry 1968 musical play about the history of mining’s union struggles from the early 19th century onwards.

It’s not the most instantly accessible of dramas, as an insufficiently characterised couple’s golden wedding celebrations segue into flashbacks from mining’s past. Once we’ve hurtled through a couple of decades, however, it makes for rewarding, thought-provoking viewing; a plangent through-line is the miners’ continuing disappointment with the Labour Party, even after coal’s nationalisation. Samuel West’s perkily Brechtian production extracts every drop of drama from the myriad mini-scenes and tips knowing winks at gags us soft southerners are unlikely to get.
Designer Soutra Gilmour’s large pit wheel towers pensively over the stage, which is peopled by a hard-working cast of nine actor-musicians among whom Jane Holman as a pitman’s stoic wife stands out. Alex Glasgow’s evocative folk songs provide stirring interludes and underline quite what a sense of community was lost along with nearly all our mines.
Close the Coalhouse Door runs until May 12 (0844 871 7651, atgtickets.com/richmond). Also at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, May 29-June 2.

Classic coalhouse play relaunched at Richmond Theatre

Classic coalhouse play relaunched at Richmond Theatre

7:20am Sunday 6th May 2012 in News By Christine Fleming

Close the coalhouse door by Alan Plater.
Photo credit: - Keith Pattison

A play charting all the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history will launch its national tour at Richmond Theatre.
Close the Coalhouse Door is based on the stories of Sid Chaplin, a miner turned writer, with joyful and heart-tugging music inspired by folk songs from the north-east of England.
The play, by Alan Plater, was first performed in Newcastle in 1968 but has been revived as a memorial production following his death in 2010.
Director Samuel West says the work is moving in places but some of the original folk songs are “cheeky and very funny” and he promises theatregoers a good night out.
He says: “Coalhouse is set at a golden wedding - so of course it’s a party to honour 50 years of love and family life. “But it's also a celebration of a community - of the north-east miners, the stories and the songs that inspired them and commemorated their lives and losses, their victories and their struggle. “And it celebrates an important principle - that as people we must make and produce things, not just sell things.”

Plater is considered one of the greatest writers of the golden age of British television drama. As well as 18 episodes of Z-Cars, he wrote Fortunes of War, the Beiderbecke Affair, the Last of the Blonde Bombshells and A Very British Coup.
Erica Whyman, chief executive and artistic director of Northern Stage, says: “Coalhouse is a warm-hearted, timely and powerfully moving piece of theatre which speaks to many of our fears and furies about the times we’re living through now.”
Close the Coalhouse Door, Richmond Theatre. Wednesday, May 9, until Saturday, May 12. Call 0844 8717651.

This Is Local London

Close the Coalhouse Door – review

Northern Stage, Newcastle

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 May 2012 18.00 BST

There's a strong theme of fathers and sons running throughout Close the Coalhouse Door. First Alan Plater dramatised stories by his mentor, the literary pitman Sid Chaplin, singing the praises of the north-eastern mining tradition. Now Plater's heir apparent, Lee Hall, has provided supplementary material, bringing the story up to date.
"Bringing the story up to date" means, of course, incorporating the fact that there's no north-eastern mining industry left to sing about. In Soutra Gilmour's design, the red-brick terraced house in which the action takes place is now condemned, overlooked by a billboard advertising Meryl Streep's performance as The Iron Lady. But it very much remains Plater's piece. Hall likens his intervention to "keyhole surgery. I kept thinking, 'What would Alan do?'"
First staged in 1968, Close the Coalhouse Door did for the coalfields what Oh! What a Lovely War did for the fields of Flanders. Its roots lie in a long history of politicised struggle, but its soul belongs to the music hall. The setting is a family gathering to celebrate a golden wedding anniversary, though the front parlour is really a forum for Plater's playful brand of gritty northern surrealism, in which a family dispute is interrupted by Lord Hailsham performing a Geordie vaudeville routine, or Harold Wilson popping round to explain government fuel policy.
The original threw a brass band into the works: Samuel West's exuberant production (a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre) makes do with an engaging ensemble of actor-musicians, with the original folk anthems of Alex Glasgow treated to inventive new arrangements by Sam Kenyon. And Hall's surgery, though subtle, is incisive. His main contribution is to add a telling coda that links the collapse of the coal industry to the rise of the call centre. What would Plater have done? He'd have laughed a lot and despaired a little, along with everyone else.

Close the Coalhouse Door, Northern Stage, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

By Chris Tighe

Superb casting does justice to the fine music of Alex Glasgow and the prose of Sid Chaplin

“It’s only a story,” sing the characters at the end of Lee Hall’s adapted version of Close the Coalhouse Door, Alan Plater’s affectionate portrayal of a mining community in the north-east of England.
When it was first staged in 1968, this musical play’s honesty and humour made it a huge hit with the people it represented, luring many miners into the theatre. For them, this was no story; it was their world, made vivid with great writing and stirring music. Today, with UK coal mining and the communities that depended on it mere shadows of their powerful past selves, the challenge is to ensure that the play’s timeless humanity, and our conclusions about the fate of those communities since pit closures, are not engulfed by the history it recites.

In this regard, this new production, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre, both Newcastle-based, is helped by superb casting. Under director Samuel West, the actors are thoroughly convincing in the play’s sudden shifts between pathos, lyricism and comedy. And they do justice to the fine music of Alex Glasgow and the prose of Sid Chaplin, both north-easterners whose innate feel for their region shone through in their collaboration with Plater.
The set works well. A terraced house façade, above which looms the skeletal framework of pithead winding gear, pivots to create, on one side, a simple street, on the other a cosy living room.
Cosy is not a word ever applied to Billy Elliot, Lee Hall’s seminal work about a boy’s yearning to dance set against the grim background of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. Nor to Pitman Painters, his theatrical triumph with Live Theatre, although it too drew on historical reality.
In this production, Hall is loyal to his friend and mentor Plater, who died in 2010. Hall describes his additional material as “keyhole surgery”; in particular he has enhanced the role of Ruth, the outsider who challenges John, the young miner, over his ambivalent attitude to his identity. Only in John, whose inner struggles recall miner Oliver Kilbourn in the Pitman Painters, do we see real depth of character.
For a fleeting moment towards the end, Hall propels us into 2012; the result is both comic and uncomfortable. Otherwise, we must draw our own conclusions about what happened after the mid-70s, when the play ends. This is the prequel, not the sequel, to Billy Elliot.

Until May 5, then touring. www.northernstage.co.uk

Financial Times

The Stage - Close the Coalhouse Door

Close the Coalhouse Door

Published Thursday 19 April 2012 at 14:20 by Laura Fraine

Alan Plater’s celebrated 1968 play of the North East miner’s struggle was based on stories by his friend and mentor Sid Chaplin. The play has been handed down like the stories within and there is a pleasing continuity in the fact that Lee Hall, for whom Plater was a mentor, has brought it up to date.

From a powerful opening, the production maintains a keen rhythm. As always, Soutra Gilmour’s set enhances the narrative.

There is a lot of talent on stage. All actors sing and play music arranged by Sam Kenyon. Jane Holman (Mary) and Nicholas Lumley (Thomas) both give outstanding performances as the resilient older couple for whom history, family and the pit are all intertwined. Chris Connel’s union man, Jackie, is an interesting character, his strong self-assurance in direct contrast to embittered John (Paul Woodson), the only man of the group who still labours at the coalface. David Nellist plays Geordie, the joker, and as such is given the pivotal line: “But the conscience of the nation was stirred,” which becomes emptier with each refrain, even while the production hammers away to stir something in us. The politics are central, just occasionally at the drama’s expense, which demands an unlikely but politically convenient love-triangle. The beautiful writing in this play strikes right to the heart, though it is Alex Glasgow’s songs - tough as the pitmen, rich as the seam - which endure long after the curtain falls.

Production information

Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 18-May 5, then touring until June 30

Author:Alan Plater, Lee Hall

Director:Samuel West

Producer:Northern Stage and Live Theatre

Cast includes:Chris Connel, Louisa Farrant, Jane Holman, Nicholas Lumley, David Nellist, Paul Woodson

Running time:2hr 40min

The Stage

Review: Close The Coalhouse Door, Northern Stage

Review: Close The Coalhouse Door, Northern Stage

• by Gordon Barr, Evening Chronicle
• Apr 20 2012



A revamp of Close The Coalhouse Door had its world premiere in Newcastle this week

 

A REVAMP of Close The Coalhouse Door had its world premiere in Newcastle this week. Entertainment Editor Gordon Barr was there on opening night.
THEATRE in Education is a great thing ...but here you have education within theatre.
Close The Coalhouse Door was a huge success when it first premiered in Newcastle back in 1968.
Written by Alan Plater with songs by Alex Glasgow, it saw miners foregoing their trips to St James’ Park to see the Toon in favour of sitting in a darkened theatre to watch socialist drama. Such was the power of Plater’s work, it attracted the masses from the mining villages who had never witnessed this art form before, believing it to be more for those ‘Jesmond types’. Those Jesmond types still come in for some ridicule in this new version of the play, directed by Samuel West with additional material by Lee Hall.
While times may have moved on, at the heart of this production is that we should never forget our past and what we get is in fact a history lesson on the struggles of our mining communities ... perhaps the biggest legacy of how life in the region, and its people, was shaped.
Written before the blackouts of the 70s and the miners strike of the 80s, the big question was how would Lee Hall update it to take that into account.
He does so in very clever ways – audiences are met with a big publicity poster of The Iron Lady in front of the ‘coalhouse’ backdrop before any drama actually begins. At the end of the performance, we are left in no doubt about the impact of the 70s and 80s, without detracting from the main body of the play whatsoever – the ending sequence a stroke of sheer genius, bringing us bang up to date with our call centre culture of today.
The body of the work is predominantly Plater’s and takes us through the strikes, strife, traumas and political fighting of our mining communities from the 1830s to 1960s. It has heart, it has soul, it has guts, its has pathos ... it also has humour and wonderful musical moments too.

Spread over three acts, each is so compelling it feels like it lasts half the time, with the subject matter resonating with anyone with North East connections.
There is a superb link from the end of act one into the interval, just one of numerous interjections that makes the audience feel they are a part of the drama too.
A true ensemble piece, Chris Connel, David Nellist, Adam Barlow, Nicholas Lumley, Louisa Farrant, Jane Holman, Tarek Merchant, Jack Wilkinson and Paul Woodson excel throughout.
A co-production between Live Theatre and Northern Stage – playing at the latter until May 5 – this remains a triumphant piece of theatre.
It is also a striking piece of education that all generations should see, learn and benefit from.

Read More http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/entertainment-in-newcastle/theatre/2012/04/20/review-close-the-coalhouse-door-northern-stage-72703-30802471/#ixzz1sbNHSH00

 

Close the Coalhouse Door delivers miners' message

11 April 2012

By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

Director Samuel West and writer Lee Hall hope a revival of Alan Plater's 1968 play Close the Coalhouse Door can teach a new generation about fighting for their rights.



Mining is a theme in Lee Hall's work from Billy Elliot
to The Pitmen Painters. Photo: NCJ Media



When I put my first question to Samuel West, a simple query about his motivation for staging Close the Coalhouse Door, he begins his answer with the words: "I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with the direction of our current government..."

The play is 44 years old and centres on the lives of miners in Newcastle, so it may seem odd that the conversation immediately turns to modern politics.

But Samuel West - the actor-director who starred in Howard's End and the play Enron - and Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall are both political animals.
So it soon transpires that there is more to this revival, which opens at Northern Stage in Newcastle on Friday, than just the resurrection of a neglected theatrical treasure.
When the play first came to the city in 1968, it was a massive hit.
Stories of pitmen going to the theatre instead of the football on a Saturday afternoon, and of coachloads of miners rolling up at the theatre in their Sunday best, have passed into local legend.
The plot revolves around a Newcastle family looking back on 140 years of miners' struggles against pit-owners and politicians.


Actor-turned-director Samuel West: "It was a story that needed to be told." Photo: Topher McGrillis



But Plater's irreverent saga of bickering brothers and plucky underdogs, coupled with songs by Alex Glasgow, is more than just a dry lesson in the history of industrial relations.

Starting in the 1830s, it recounts how pioneering unions formed, and went on strike, in protest at long hours worked by young boys and "bonds" that tied miners to punishing rules and conditions.

By joining together for strength in the face of hardship, the miners gradually won more rights as the decades wore on.

 


"The play becomes very relevant because it is a celebration of having collectively achieved something as a nation that I think we're in danger of throwing away," says Hall.

"It's a reminder that the life we rely on now was not always the case. People had to fight for it."
The play has lessons for people hit by of the current financial crisis and austerity cuts, he believes.


Close the Coalhouse Door opens at Northern Stage
 in Newcastle before going on a UK tour



"There's a feeling now that it's so hopeless and there's nothing we can do and we just have to put up with it because it's the inexorable forces of history and economics.

"[In the play] you see that every 30 or 40 years, just in one industry alone, exactly the same things happen again and again.
"But what they didn't do was just to sit and take it. What they did do was to fight back."
The play is "very provocative" in today's climate, he says.
West, the son of British acting legends Timothy West and Prunella Scales and a former member of the Socialist Workers' Party, is similarly strident.
He accuses the coalition government of using the financial crisis as "an excuse" to reduce living standards and turn individuals against each other.
"That's not how progress is made and it isn't how the miners progressed in this country," he says. "I thought it was a story that needed to be told, really."
West winces at the thought he is "preaching" and insists it is a good piece of theatre. "It's not at all narrow agitprop."



Many people will disagree with the pair's politics and with Plater's interpretation of history, which firmly pits the gutsy workers against the evil elite.

And while it was a hit in Newcastle first time around, the play was a flop when it moved to the West End.



The play was televised by the BBC in 1968



The north-east folk story, dominated by the mining industry's heroes and villains, did not strike a chord in London. The thick Geordie brogue probably did not help.

This time the show, a co-production between Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle, is going on tour after its run in the city.

Hall and West are confident that it will fare better in places like Richmond-upon-Thames, Guildford and Oxford than it did in the West End.

For the new version, Hall, a friend and protege of Plater, has added a short scene at the beginning to take people back to 1968, and one at the end that gives the 1968 family's rose-tinted vision of how the next 44 years would pan out.



Alan Plater was made a CBE for services to drama in 2005, five years before his death



Unfortunately, Newcastle United have not ended up as winners of the European Cup for 15 years in a row.

But Hall and West want the miners of the past to deliver a serious message to the audiences of the present. So what difference can a show like this really make?

"I'm not sure that plays can make any difference, but they can make people think," Hall says.

"If it reminds one single person that what is purported to be inevitable is not inevitable, then it will have been worth reviving.

"I think its big message is that the people of the 99%, the ordinary people, have some power and can alter things. I think it's a timely reminder to people that that is the case."

Sam West: 'I'm cheap and available – tell your friends!'

He may be theatre royalty – and he observes the fashion for class – but the actor/director is more political than posh

Sunday 08 April 2012  

Belief in the project, for which Lee Hall has supplied additional material to Plater's blazing 1968 script, is something that West, 45, possesses in abundance. He's certainly done his homework, quoting frightening statistics about safety standards in Chilean mines, and providing staunch defence of the union movement, whose struggles and occasional triumphs down the decades provide the beating heart of the play. "If you want to use Conservative rhetoric, unions are the Big Society in action, people getting together to help each other for not very much money," he says pointedly. As a council member for the actors' union, Equity, and vice-chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, it's a point that matters dearly to him.

Lee Hall has provided staunch advocacy of mining before, in Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, and I wonder aloud whether mining has, for us now, somehow come to symbolise something greater than itself, namely the death of a manufacturing and unionised Britain. "I think it does stand for something we fear we might have lost," West agrees sadly. "Part-time jobs, itinerant workplaces or service jobs don't breed unionisation – or community, or community spirit – in the same way."

All of which seems a good juncture to ask him for his views on the "actors and class" debate that has been rumbling in the media for some weeks, ignited by Downton Abbey's Rob James-Collier saying that it's harder for working-class actors and Dominic West (no relation to Sam) adding fuel to the flames by claiming "Old Etonian" is a label that provokes hatred. Sam West starts off by sidestepping the question. "Speaking personally, as somebody who does a reasonably good RP, I wish I was 10 years younger. When I came out of university, from about 1989 to 2002 nobody made anything but East End gangster movies. And now everybody's doing posh stuff and I haven't got any cheekbones any more! I've got my career in completely the wrong order!"

I suspect this won't be West's last word on the subject, and it isn't. "Shameless is the new Boys from the Blackstuff: there's certainly a change in the way the working classes are being portrayed on television. In our last government we had a home secretary who used to be a postman and now we've got the 19th Eton-educated prime minister, so Dominic might reflect on that. I hasten to add that I'm an enormous fan of Dominic's and I get quite a lot of his fan mail, so I don't want to diss him in any way!"

West returns from time to time to the subject of social mobility. "I think it's really important that what it's like to live in this country doesn't just become an upper-class narrative," he says at one point, before concluding as we part, "I really do think the things that make our society what it is are under threat. It should be about everyone having the potential to be what they're going to be."

What, then, does he think about our current televisual fixation with the rigid class hierarchies of the past, in Downton and Upstairs Downstairs? He confesses that he doesn't watch the programmes but hopes they're not a reflection of an idea that this is the way things are supposed to be.

"I wonder whether we look back to a time of supposed certainty, where people knew their place, because we don't know our place at the moment and looking into the future is difficult. The really interesting thing about reviving a play written in 1968 is there's a much stronger feeling of potential and hope for the future. At the moment we are having to face the known possibility that we are passing on to our children a less good world than we inherited. I don't mind people being at the top of the ladder, I mind them pulling it up after them." Would he ever consider a role in period dramas like these? "Of course. I'm cheap and available – tell your friends!'

Despite fluctuating demand for cheekbones and RP, West has enjoyed a wonderfully varied career as an actor, director and voiceover artist. One of his earliest roles, as Leonard Bast in Merchant Ivory's exquisite film adaptation of E M Forster's Howards End, led to a Bafta nomination and with it the chance to try to crack Hollywood. However, after discussing the possibility with his parents, Prunella Scales and Timothy West, he chose to stay at home.

Does he regret that? "Only in so far as one regrets the things one hasn't done just because one hasn't done them. When people say, 'If I had my life over again I wouldn't do anything different', well, I'd do everything differently just for the variety'." This course of action, he says, meant he didn't have to "risk failure" in Los Angeles. Is he scared of failure? "Not as much as I'm scared of success," he replies emphatically.

Success happened over here anyway, with acclaimed turns as Richard II and Hamlet for the RSC and, latterly, with the "performance of his career", as one critic described it, as Jeffrey Skilling in the multi-award-winning Enron. He also had two years as artistic director at Sheffield, before disagreements with the board ended his tenure. Did he enjoy being at the helm? "Modified rapture," he says wryly. "It was awfully difficult and I messed up a lot of things about it." Nevertheless, he'd like to run another building some day and I suggest that the Almeida, just over the road from his Islington flat, might be the perfect fit.

West is disarmingly honest about the benefits of having parents well established in the family business. "It certainly got me auditions, but I don't think it ever got me jobs. People wanted to meet me because they knew my parents, yes." He claims that all his professional ambitions – "to be in Doctor Who, play Hamlet and read the shipping forecast" – have been fulfilled. So what about doing a Glenda Jackson and going into politics? "Being a frustrated idealist backbencher, like many of my favourite MPs, would sometimes be hell on earth," he says ruefully. Anyway, for now, Sam West is gloriously content with taking a play about coal-mining to Newcastle.

Close the Coalhouse Door is at Northern Stage, Newcastle, 13 April to 5 May (0191 230 5151, northern stage.co.uk), then tours nationwide until 30 June

On the most cursory of glances, it seems an unlikely fit. Actor-director Samuel West, owner of some of the nicest vowel sounds on our stage and Oxford-educated scion of famous acting parents, is off to Newcastle to direct Alan Plater's fierce modern classic about mining, Close the Coalhouse Door. Yet after just a few minutes' conversation, West, eloquent and personable, leaves one in no doubt as to his passionately held political and ideological convictions. He's clear what he would say to any who question his suitability for this job. "Their point would be? That I'm not authentic? I didn't believe in talking mice either, but I was still allowed to be in Narnia [as King Caspian in the television adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]. You can't tell the story of mines without believing that most of the time progress was made at the expense of the people who were at the bottom and got paid the least. I believe that, so that means I'm allowed to direct the play!"

Still a rich seam: reviving Close the Coalhouse Door

It had songs, jokes and politics – and was a hit with intellectuals and miners. Playwright Lee Hall on the thrill of bringing Close the Coalhouse Door to 21st-century audiences

• Lee Hall
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 March 2012 18.30 BST

Geraldine Moffatt, Alan Browning and Dudley Foster in a BBC adaptation
of Close the Coalhouse Door. Photograph: BBC/BBC Pictures Archives

 

In 1968, an ex-ballet-dancing, now theatre-directing, son of a miner called Bill Hays gathered the emerging playwright Alan Plater with the founding father of north-east working-class writing, the ex-miner Sid Chaplin; his aim was to create a show that would be "an unqualified hymn of praise to the miners". Rounding off the group was Alex Glasgow, a brilliant songwriter, famous for his hilarious, sardonic songs that – although virtually all written in the Geordie vernacular – were part Brecht, part Brassens and part Tom Lehrer.

(Hays and Plater, who had met while working on the groundbreaking BBC show Z Cars, would go on to create some of the most loved and provocative TV of the 1970s and beyond.) Chaplin was already a major figure through his groundbreaking work, which told of working-class life from the point of view of a working-class person. The show this group created, Close the Coalhouse Door, became a landmark of post-war regional theatre.
Inspired by Joan Littlewood's success with Oh! What A Lovely War, the group wanted to use the tools of working-class entertainment – music hall, vaudeville, drinking songs and coarse humour – to tell the more politicised story of mining in the north east; or, more accurately, the popular unionised resistance to the incredible exploitation that had marred its history since the industrial revolution. It was an audacious task: could anything be more potentially boring, worthy and of limited local interest?
But the show they created, originally scheduled for a modest run of a few weeks, caused a sensation. The shock that a theatre might have a play that was not only a "good night out", but which also told the people's history from the people's perspective, was pretty much unheard of. The run was extended again and again. The car park was packed every night with coaches hired by miners from pit villages across the north. who were flocking to see the show in their thousands. You could spot the miners in the audience: they were all dressed immaculately in suits and ties, while the scruffy, leftish intelligentsia stuck out like sore thumbs. But for once, here was a show that satisfied both.
Six months after it opened, it went on the road, first to Nottingham, then to the West End; a triumphant run, but Newcastle was bereft without it. Over the next five years, there were three further productions, and it has since been revived regularly. Ironically, the play has proved more resilient than the monumental industry it critiqued.
As something of a specialist in the dramatic portrayal of miners (having written Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters), I was recently asked by the actor and director Sam West to help shape a new revival. (The late Alan Plater was a good friend of mine, and very much a mentor.) At first, I worried that what was once a celebration would seem like an elegy; but on closer examination, far from being an exercise in nostalgia, the play is more urgent than ever. As the specifics of the mining story have started to recede, the themes of popular resistance and the necessity, efficacy and cost of that struggle seem like a rebuke to our current quietism.
The play is anything but rousing agitprop. It is delicate, ironic and fraught with ambivalence, which, in my view, marks the best political art. It itemises economic crisis after crisis over the last 200 years, making it impossible to ignore the fact that what we are facing today is just the latest in a litany of such occasions: where external events are conveniently used to impoverish the majority.
The play today is no longer a hymn of praise to a dirty industry. It is a paean to generations of people in England who stood up to manifest injustice and often faced state-sanctioned gunfire, eviction and the draconian economic hardships. Clearly this is not an old story. This is a play for the age of Occupy and riots in Greece. As one of the first reviewers insisted, the play is about how history's slaves fought back. We can now see the struggle remains the same even if its specific industrial context has changed beyond recognition. The real question it asks is: what do we do now?

Cast revealed for new play

• by Gordon Barr, Evening Chronicle
• Feb 29 2012

CASTING has been announced for Alan Plater’s Close The Coalhouse Door, which is being revived by Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle.
Directed by Samuel West, with additional material by Lee Hall, the production will open at Northern Stage on Wednesday, April 28, with previews from Friday, April 13, and will tour the UK until June 2012.
Adam Barlow (Coronation Street) will play the Vicar, Chris Connel (The Pitmen Painters) will play Jackie, Louisa Farrant (The Glass Slipper, Northern Stage) will play Ruth and Jane Holman (film of Billy Elliot) will play Mary.
Other cast members include David Nellist (Billy Elliot) who will play Geordie, and Paul Woodson (Eternal Law) who will play John.
Samuel West said: “When I began casting Close the Coalhouse Door, I was apprehensive. Finding people to populate a play with a strong sense of place and music at its heart was always going to involve a big search.
“The shopping list of skills we need is long: native or convincing Geordies who can sing, move, tour and play at least one musical instrument and preferably two, and who have the talent and wit to serve Alan Plater and Sid Chaplin’s words.
“I needn’t have worried. At the very first casting session in Newcastle I realised the incredible depth of talent in the North East.”

Close The Coalhouse Door, based on the stories of Sid Chaplin with songs by Alex Glasgow, is a musical play written and first performed in Newcastle in 1968, charting major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831.
The story is structured around music by Alex Glasgow, inspired by north eastern folk songs.
Alan Plater CBE, who died last year, was one of the greatest writers of the golden age of British television drama.

Read More http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/entertainment-in-newcastle/music/2012/02/29/cast-revealed-for-new-play-72703-30425903/#ixzz1nt1uzB1u

West & Hall Collaborate on New Version of Plater's Coalhouse

 West & Hall Collaborate on New Version of Plater's Coalhouse

Samuel West in Enron (2009)

Date: 9 January 2012

Samuel West will direct a new touring production of Alan Plater’s Close the Coalhouse Door later this year, produced by Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle and featuring additional material by Billy Elliot and Pitmen Painters writer Lee Hall.

The production will premiere at Northern Stage on 18 April 2012 (previews from 13 April) before touring the UK until June.

Plater’s ‘play with songs’, which was written and first performed in Newcastle in 1968, charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831. The music, by Alex Glasgow, is inspired by north eastern folk songs of each period.

Lee Hall, who is writing a new ending and an additional song for the new production, said: “This is a very important play. Live Theatre and Northern Stage are two of the most exciting theatres in the country. Sam’s involvement ensures that this will be an explosive and thrilling piece of theatre. I can’t wait for it to start.”

Samuel West added: “Coalhouse is set at a Golden Wedding - so of course it's a party to honour 50 years of love and family life. But it's also a celebration of a community - of the North East miners, the stories and the songs that inspired them and commemorated their lives and losses, their victories and their struggle ... It's an honour to be working in this great city on the work of one of our best-loved writers.”

Alan Plater, who died last year, wrote numerous plays including Sweet Sorrow, Shooting the Legend, All Credit to the Lads, I Thought I Heard a Rustling, Peggy for You (a tribute to his former literary agent Peggy Ramsay), Only a Matter of Time and The Blonde Bombshells Of 1943 (a prequel to the 2000 TV series starring Judi Dench). He was also a leading writer of television drama, with credits including Z-Cars, Fortunes of War and A Very British Coup.

Close the Coalhouse Door will visit Richmond Theatre (9-12 May), The Lowry, Salford (15-19 May), Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield (23-26 May), Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford (29 May-2 June), Gala, Durham (12-16 June), Oxford Playhouse (19-23 June) and Theatre Royal, York (26-30 June).

Whats On Stage - West & Hall Collaborate

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

15/02/2012

As a new production of Close the Coalhouse Door starts to take shape, actor-director Sam West talks to BARBARA HODGSON about his role in reviving a Northern classic

IN 1962 when Close the Coalhouse Door made its debut in Newcastle local people turned out in their droves, ensuring an instant sell-out.
What for many was a rare night at the theatre stirred regional pride.
At the heart of Alan Plater’s musical play – based on stories by Sid Chaplin – were working class heroes, miners and their families.
Knitted into the story of a couple’s golden wedding party were threads of mining history, flashbacks to hopes and disappointments with plenty of laughter along the way, while pulsating through it all were the vibrant songs of socialist songwriter Alex Glasgow.
It was political, pickaxe-rattling stuff long before the decimation of the coal mining industry in the 1980s really got the blood flowing.
After the warmth of its welcome in Newcastle, its transfer to London’s West End met with a reception that could be described at best as tepid.

But that was then, and we’ve since seen modern Northern classics such as Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters seduce Southern audiences with their spirit and charm.
Now even Sting is getting in on the act with his plans for a Wallsend shipyards-inspired musical called The Last Ship.
It will be interesting to see how a revival of Close the Coalhouse Door – opening in April on the site of its debut at the former Newcastle Playhouse, now Northern Stage – will be received this time when it goes on tour.
“It didn’t do particularly well then in London. It should have done!” says Sam West who’s directing the new production, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre, which is based on Newcastle Quayside.
The London-based actor director – nominated for a BAFTA for his role in 1992 Merchant Ivory film Howards End and star of the just ended ITV1 series Eternal Law – is fully aware of his responsibility in taking over a Northern classic, whose creators are now all dead. “That’s one of the slight pressures of doing it here,” admits the 45-year-old when I catch up with him at Northern Stage, “but it’s a nice pressure.”
West remains best known for his stage, TV and film roles, but recent years – including his spell as artistic director of Sheffield Theatres – have seen him make his name as a director. He’s also recently directed his first radio play.
Hearing his enthusiasm for his new project, which will see Lee Hall write new material to bring the story up to date, assures us it’s in a safe pair of hands.
West has done his homework. He makes passing reference to visiting Woodhorn, the former colliery-turned museum in Northumberland, and when I mention the work of local photographer Keith Pattison, who covered the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Easington, he already knows it.
The background of the play is something West can connect with, regardless of what his own growing up as the son of famous acting parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales, might have been like.
At university he joined the Socialist Workers Party and was briefly a member of the Socialist Alliance. He mentions he’s a member of the council of Equity, the actors’ union, and while he’s not talking about himself when he says “sometimes you need a terrier to fight your corner”, you get the impression he could.
As an 18-year-old, West was in Western Australia, where his mother was directing his father in Uncle Vanya, at the time Alex Glasgow emigrated there with his family and he muses he could have passed the late singer-songwriter in the street.
As it happens, his connection with the play came about by chance.
He recalls that after Plater’s death he’d read an obituary praising the brilliance of Close the Coalhouse Door. Then he met Michael Chaplin – writer son of Sid – at a wedding and brought up the subject.
“I said, ‘I wonder who will revive the play’ and he said ‘why don’t you revive it’? I thought ‘that’s not going to happen’.” However, there followed talks involving Max Roberts, artistic director of Live Theatre and also Plater’s son-in-law, and Erica Whyman, chief executive of Northern Stage, and the seeds of a collaboration took root.
“And that was that,” says West. “They asked me, I was free and it’s very exciting.”
Previous revivals of the play don’t seem to have had the buzz of this one, which has Hall incorporating the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike.
He and West, who changed their mind about the initial idea of including a new song, have been deep in discussion about it in the capital (Hall’s home is just around the corner from West’s) ahead of Newcastle rehearsals which are soon to start.
On the day I meet West, cast details have been finalised but not yet released.


Having just spoken of a conversation with a North East taxi driver who’d seen Billy Elliot in London and remarked that the actors didn’t have proper Easington accents, West says: “You have to get it right and that’s something we’re going to try to do.
“The actors will be native to the North East or very convincing Geordies.”
West intends to tread carefully with the play, striking just the right note to bridge the time gap and connect with those too young to have a memory of the 1980s strike let alone the play’s 1960s context.
“One of the things I’m trying to do with Lee is to get back to that ‘68 version and to open it out in ways that are more about being true to the 68 version.”
In terms of framework, Plater’s play will sit in the middle rather than be part of an updated whole.
“We’re trying to preserve the piece,” says West. “I don’t want to say too much about it. We want it be a nice surprise.
“It will be good, it will be subtle and hard hitting.”

He adds: “We’re certainly intending to use all Alex’s original music. The play has beautiful songs and beautiful writing.
“One of the very interesting things about talking to Michael about his dad was how Sid’s style had come out in this play.”
Those rich stories, convincingly brought to life on stage, become important memories, he suggests, “when you destroy an industry like Margaret Thatcher did”.
“Culture nowadays is becoming about dressing up in the evenings for posh people and we have to remind ourselves that stories belong to the people.”
He’s looking forward to working in Newcastle, where in the past he has starred in RSC productions of Richard ll and (his award-winning) Hamlet.
West is glad, he says, that he doesn’t have to make his living as a director: “I find it much more difficult that acting.
“When actors say no to me, and they might for all sorts of reasons, I tend to take it terribly personally, but I can say no for the same reasons!” Ideally, he’d like to keep his hand in with directing once or twice a year, alongside his acting and also radio work.
He’s incredibly busy.
“I did Enron, which ran for almost a year, and last year I did a TV series and a film,” he says.
He recently starred alongside his father in Caryl Churchill’s two-hander A Number, a play about cloning which revisits the nature versus nurture debate.
It took them to Cape Town where his father “did a great performance– at 77!” He laughs: “My dad is just like a 25-year-old, if he’s unemployed for six weeks he gets really antsy.”
West’s mother, the former Fawlty Towers star, works “not so much”, he says, although they have just worked together on readings picked by Nicholas Parsons for the radio show, With Great Pleasure.
He’s just waiting to hear whether there’s to be another series of Eternal Law, where he loved being pitched in, student accommodation-like, and being able to walk to work in the beautiful city of York.
“I very much hope there will be. It was one of the happiest jobs I’ve ever done, and others enjoyed it.
“Whether they enjoyed it enough is another question.”
He hopes to be directing again towards the end of the year, and he also has a film coming out: Hyde Park On Hudson, about the royal visit George Vl made to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he plays the king opposite Bill Murray’s President.
Following the meeting of the men who each struggled with a physical challenge – the king his stammer and Roosevelt with polio – George Vl returned with a renewed confidence, says West, in his role.
“I’m a republican but I think you have to recognise a job well done,” he adds.
Close the Coalhouse Door is at Northern Stage from April 13 until May 5 before heading off on a national tour which also takes in Gala Theatre in Durham from June 12-16. Visit www.northernstage.co.uk or call 0191 230 5151.


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