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REVIEW: Brassed Off, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until August 31 ****

Barney Taylor’s Andy, front left, and Hannah Woodward’s Gloria lead the cheers in Brassed Off. Picture: Pamela Raith

YORK filmmaker Mark Herman’s 1996 colliery band drama Brassed Off was first turned into a stage play with music by Paul Allen at Sheffield Crucible in 1998.

Bridlington-born Herman and Alan Ayckbourn biographer and “failed trombonist” Allen were both in the audience for Tuesday’s Scarborough press night for Liz Stevenson’s co-production for Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, the Stepehen Joseph Theatre and the Bolton Octagon Theatre.

Like the Crucible, all three are theatres in the round, an intimate 360-degree seating configuration that engenders and enhances the intense sense of community that Herman and in turn Allen extol.

“Since the first performances in 1998 it has become more and more of a memory play,” writes Allen in his programme notes before adding: “It always was (the pits had nearly all closed or been scheduled for closure by then) but I don’t think I thought of it that way at the time.”

Stevenson’s 2024 production – 40 years after the cataclysmic Miners’ Strike and 30 after the 1994 setting of Herman’s film – is very much a memory play, still narrated by Phil’s son, Shane, but now the 38-year-old, enervated adult Shane (Andrew Turner), who goes on to play his idealistic eight-year-old self.

In trim white shirt and dark trousers, he matches the look of the Narrator in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, but whereas Russell’s character is all-knowing and menacing, Shane is wistful and still seeking answers: answers that tellingly are not forthcoming as hope withers on the vine.

Allen’s notes predict “no obvious collective future in the age of the internet”, but he does say ‘we are a community, in the theatre or the concert hall, just as a band or company of actors have that sense of community’. That sentiment is all the more pertinent in an age when the arts have been subject to funding cuts and a curriculum cull at schools at universities, just as the mining industry was crushed under the Tory boot in the 1980s and ’90s.

Director Stevenson was adamant Brassed Off in 2024 should not be a “nostalgia festival”, and it most definitely isn’t, even if brass band music always evokes the past, like the first whiff of Bisto. A memory play, yes, but one fuelled by bad memories, as much as by a beleaguered community pulling together, their northern humour and jesting, jousting banter defiant to the last in a play suffused with raw wounds, pathos and pride.

And the band played on: A rousing moment in miners’ lamps in Brassed Off. Picture: Pamela Raith

Simon Kenny’s set design could not be starker: a coal-black floor and a spoil heap on a curve, with a pile of coal at each end, to contrast with the canary-yellow crate seating, brought on and off stage by Stevenson’s cast, and the glint of the brass instruments.

The plot, should you need a refresher course, finds the mining community of Grimley, Yorkshire, fighting to keep the colliery open ten years after the Miners’ Strike. Widowed band leader Danny (Russell Richardson) is fighting too, both against ill health and to keep his dispirited band of brass-playing miners together, when his dream of qualifying for the national championships is countered by the spectre of a vote to decide the miners and the mine’s future.

We meet couples under stultifying pressure: Danny’s son, trombone player and hapless clown Phil (Joey Hickman) and wife Sandra (Daneka Etchells), struggling with debts and a new-born fourth child; veteran miners and band members Jim (Greg Patmore) and Harry (Matt Ian Kelly) and their exasperated wives Vera (Joanna Holden) and Rita (Maxine Finch).

Then comes the re-kindling of a school-day crush as Gloria (Hannah Woodward) returns to Grimley, to work on a research project and add her flugelhorn to the band, while stirring old feelings in local lothario Shane (Andrew Turner). A Montague-Capulet division plays out in their  latter-day Romeo & Juliet wooing, but with Yorkshire frankness.

To quote Allen again: “Sharing a room, however briefly, and sharing an emotional roller-coaster, we are something more than our individual selves for a few hours but also utterly ourselves. Which is rather glorious.”

How right he is, and that sense of community striving to survive beyond the dying of the mining age is all the stronger for the band playing on. Here that band combines five actor-musicians from the cast (Hickman, Patmore, Kelly, Taylor and Woodward) with a pool of community musicians (including Kate Lock, from York) that changes from show to show.

Matthew Malone’s arrangements are a joy, bringing cheers and tears alike. So do Stevenson’s cast, especially Richardson’s stoical Danny, Hickman’s desperate Phil, Etchells’ despairing Sandra and the sparky sparring of Taylor’s Andy and Woodward’s Gloria.

Brassed Off: still angry, still moving, still as resilient and resonant as ever. Top brass, top class, you might say, as the standing ovation testifies.

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, and Octagon Theatre, Bolton present Brassed Off, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until August 31, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

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Brassed Off resonates down the years in new revival of colliery band drama at SJT

A scene from Liz Stevenson’s production of Brassed Off. Picture: Pamela Raith

LIZ Stevenson’s new staging of Brassed Off marks the 40th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike and the 30th anniversary of the 1994 setting of York film-maker Mark Herman’s pit community drama.

Adapted for the stage by Paul Allen, the co-production by Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, and Octagon Theatre, Bolton, has moved from Keswick to Scarborough, where the cast of ten, including several actor-musicians, will perform Herman’s story of northern grit, heart and defiant humour from tonight until August 31.

Ten years after the Miners’ Strike, the mining community of Grimley, Yorkshire, is fighting to keep the colliery open. Meanwhile, revered band leader Danny is battling to keep his dispirited band of brass-playing miners together, fuelled by the dream of qualifying for the national championships at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Loyalty is tested, pressure mounts and the community begins to break apart, but can the band find a way to play on? 

“It’s a timely moment to present this iconic play, 40 years after the 1984 Miners’ Strike,” says Liz, Theatre by the Lake’s artistic director. “Our production looks back on the battles of this close-knit mining community, asking: what has changed? And what does this play mean to us today? We’ve assembled an incredible team to deliver a moving theatrical experience that celebrates the resilience of communities and the transformative power of music.” 

Liz’s vision for the production started with the question: How do you see the play from a 2024 perspective?  “It occurred to me that in our audience, there will be people who lived through the Miners’ Strike, worked down the pit,  and are still affected by it. Others will have had little experience of it and won’t have been affected.

“There’ll be some who know and love Mark’s film; others who won’t have seen it. So, what’s your starting point? In our production, we’ve imagined how young narrator Shane, the eight-year-old son of Phil and Sandra in the film, would be 38 now, not dissimilar to my age.

“So we’re now treating it like a memory play, where he re-lives his memories of his childhood, his father and his grandfather [band leader Danny], seeing them through adult eyes and reflecting on how the events of 1984/1994  made him the man he is today.

“Obviously lots of things have changed – though some haven’t – so it feels like a period piece, but for others it still feels like recent history, and some of our cast have grown up playing in brass bands.”

Brassed Off resonates as much as ever in 2024, when “deindustrialisation, inequality and poverty is still felt today in former mining towns and across different communities around the world”, says Liz.

“What there’s no denying in this country is that we still have a great deal of poverty, like the characters in this play. There’s a scene where Phil tries to take his life, and  it was an important decision how we would handle that scene: what led him to that point, as we see him become more and more desperate. Lots of people will be able to relate to that – it’s probably the most relatable thing in the play.”

Crucial too is Danny’s climactic speech at the Royal Albert Hall, the one where, in the moment of winning the national championships, he says: “I thought that music mattered, but does it bol****s, not compared with how people matter”. “We didn’t want to make it a nostalgia festival. We wanted to lift it out of that, stripping it back, simplifying the design too,” says Liz.

“There’s something important to be said, locally, nationally and internationally, about the significance of community and how we have to look after each other, how people matter more than money.

“This play shows how vital community is, and this production manifests that by having not only a cast of ten but also a community cast with three teams of two children and members of the local community playing in the band at each show.  That brings a community spirit to the performances – which is such a joy.”

That sense of community is enhanced by the theatre-in-the-round configuration of all three theatres. “It’s an inclusive, intimate setting, with audiences on all sides and everyone close to the action, but it’s a challenge too as the Scarborough stage is small but we have to have 19 bodies on stage at one point! You’re thinking, ‘how do we do this, with all the music, in that space, with lots of episodic scenes that flow into each other’?” says Liz.

“It needs to be fluent and dynamic, and especially as a memory play where one moment triggers the next. Something special happens when the band plays for the first time on stage: that feeling of everyone playing together in a collective endeavour. You see the importance of collaborating in the play, but when they perform the music, it takes it to another level.”

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, and Octagon Theatre, Bolton present Brassed Off, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, tonight to August 31. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.