Guardian
Saturday June 7 2008
On Thursday Gordon Brown took time out from negotiations over 42-day detention to go to the theatre and see Lee Hall's play The Pitmen Painters. Sitting a few seats away from him, I could see both his discomfort at and absorption in the production were in equal measure. Rightly so, because not only is it a compelling piece of political theatre - as one might expect of the writer of Billy Elliot - but the issues it explores are central to Labour's crisis and David Cameron's refashioning of Conservatism. Hall has no qualms about being political - the final statement, on a screen onstage, is a reference to the abolition of Clause 4 in 1995 - but not even he quite realises the extent to which he has laid out the thematic territory of the next election.
The play is based on the story of a Workers' Educational Association lecturer who in 1934 turned up in Ashington, a mining town north of Newcastle, to deliver art appreciation classes and stumbled on extraordinary talent; over the next few decades, the paintings of these 23 men found their way into galleries across the UK. Hall ends the play in 1947 as the miners celebrate a brave new world of nationalisation, and universal education and health services. Ashington could be "teeming with artists", "pitmen poets" and "pitmen painters", even "pitmen professors". Shakespeare and Goethe will no longer be the preserve of the upper classes - "it's ganna belang to us", they declare.
But of course there isn't a university of Ashington; the pit was closed in 1981 and such former pit towns register some of the highest rates of incapacity claimants in the country. What happened to this tradition of working class intellectualism and ambition? Who is demanding the right to Goethe now? It was the point Brown picked up with Hall at the interval; providing universal education has not ensured that potential and talent are realised. What else is needed?
"These pitmen had a tradition of organised labour which provided places of solidarity which made possible this kind of intellectualism," Hall comments. "They were profoundly concerned with creativity and how that linked to personal growth and collective understanding - how you learn and the relationships, with teachers, with peers, in that process."
It is the themes of autonomy, engagement and empowerment, and how they transform lives and communities, that are of such interest to politicians across the spectrum. What policies encourage them, which ones kill off their fragile growth? After a decade of investment, the electorate's faith in the state to deliver change in depressed communities is compromised - has Labour missed a part of the puzzle? - while the Conservatives argue that it is precisely the big state that crushed the self-help and initiative of the working class.
Hall is horrified that his play could become grist for Cameron. His sympathies are clear. Some of the play's best laughs are at the expense of the union official with his rule book and his citing of clauses. He is an easy figure for an impatient age to mock, but he was actually the initiator of this remarkable project. Organisation and the group's own solidarity were crucial to the pitmen's individual development as painters. Hall, however, is too subtle a playwright not to acknowledge the paradox that these can also be irritating and major constraints on that development.
At another level, the play is much more straightforward: it unashamedly celebrates one of the most powerful traditions of the 20th century, shabbily smashed in the 80s. The organised working class not only fought a war, it reshaped Britain and its achievements still organise our lives - the NHS, universal education and the welfare state. For the best part of three decades, this historical record has been an embarrassment to Labour, and an object of ridicule to the Conservatives. Hall admitted he was worried that his material was "old-fashioned" but rapturous London audiences reassured him. Are we finally ready for a reassessment in which we begin to recognise that a ruthless disenfranchisement, culturally and politically, facilitated Middle England's stranglehold on power?
Part of that disenfranchisement has been implemented through a culture of loathing: the working class is characterised as - and despised for - being fat, smoking, smacking their children, eating junk food, getting into debt and having chaotic family lives. Hall says he wanted above all to remind people of what the working class is capable of: that given the right circumstances ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. They can be much more than passive consumers of a culture they are rarely allowed to create.
· The Pitmen Painters is at the National Theatre until June 25 and will return next January [ mailto:[email protected] ][email protected]
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