The Stage

The Pitmen Painters

Published Friday 23 May 2008 at 13:30 by Ben Dowell

Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot. the smash hit story about the dancing boy from the pit village, has fashioned a similar cry for equality in the arts, but this time from the ready-made tale of the Ashington Group.

They were a collection of around 50 or so miners in the thirties and forties whose depictions of life in the their colliery town and at work made them momentary darlings of the contemporary art scene, but here are represented by five key figures from the movement.

It’s a lovely tale, and much of the ensemble acting is first-rate, especially from Ian Kelly as the principled but ethically ambiguous figure of the art academic Robert Lyon and from Deka Walmsley as the pompous local official George Brown. Christopher Connel’s role as the best of the artists Oliver Kilbourn is a lot more enjoyable than his delivery of an accent, which veered occasionally into Deep South American at some uncomfortable moments.

But the play as a whole feels like all too familiar ground. As with Billy Elliot, there are plenty of fabulous comic set pieces based around culture clashes or misunderstandings and at the spine lies a hugely partisan celebration of working class culture. “We divvun have no library, son,” one of the miners says at one point, and at times this can seem a little cloying and overly sentimental.

Hall has many good and admirable things to say about class, culture and snobbery, and repeatedly asks why this movement centred around a working person’s creative self-expression is the exception rather than a rule. But there are about three speeches too many here, all of which begin to say pretty much the same thing.