Close the Coalhouse Door – Oxford Playhouse

Close the Coalhouse Door – Oxford Playhouse

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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

 

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

Billy Elliot Writer Lee Hall Updates Alan Plater Play 'Close The Coalhouse Door'

By Nisha Joshi Location: Newcastle






Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall has helped update Alan Plater’s play Close the Coalhouse Door.

The production is set in a North East pit village and charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831.

The story is based on short stories by Sid Chaplin and is structured around music inspired by North East folk songs of each period.

Lee Hall was commissioned to revisit the piece with a new ending to bring it up to date, as the play was written before the critical 1984-85 miners' strike.

This latest version of Close the Coalhouse Door is a co-production between Northern Stage and Live Theatre and directed by actor and director Samuel West.

The play is on at Northern Stage until May 3 before touring the country.

It will return to the North East when it plays at Durham’s Gala Theatre from June 12-16.


Tyne and Wear Sky

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

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.


Read More http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-latest-news//2012/02/15/interview-actor-sam-west-on-close-the-coalhouse-door-61634-30335099/2/#ixzz1nQOdAAD8