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, 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

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

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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