Review: The Loft Theatre presents ‘Pitmen Painters’

Dropped consonants do not go down well in Leamington Spa, I should know, I’ve suffered the strange looks over shop counters. Hence, when I heard that Pitmen Painters was on the Loft Theatre programme, I was sceptical as to how well it would go down. However, as the production’s director William Wilkinson says himself, “uproarious humour is rarely absent for long”, and it certainly got Wednesday night’s audience going, despite the excessive vowels.

It must firstly be said that all of the cast’s accents were on point, and although “what did he say” was on the lips of many audience members, the endearing story inspired by true events in the mining town of Ashington won through. Set between 1934 and ’47, the play follows a group of miners who, inspired by their ‘posh’ tutor Robert Lyon, begin to explore art, its meaning and their own attempts at self-expression. Whether art is a little bit for themselves or for the benefit of the community is central to the debate, and, thanks to Mr Wilkinson’s skilled direction, the cast excel both individually and in complex group scenes.

Stand-out performances come from the central four; with Rod Wilkinson as George Brown, the finicky union man, Tom O’Connor as the dependable Oliver Kilbourn, Phil Reynolds as joker Jimmy Floyd and Gus MacDonald as the born-again socialist Harry Wilson. Andrew Cullum too, as Lyon, earned applause, most notably during his speech about how the working-class should get off their “fat arses” and take ownership of privileges such as art for themselves (I almost forgot that we are in a Conservative constituency). The talent shone through, as did the humour and the pride that these pitmen had for their community, their work and their art.

Despite the sometimes distracting projections and the tentative first night set changes it was impossible to not feel my heart swell with pride as the union banner was spread across the forestage and the pitmen swigged Newcastle brown ale between verses of their final anthem.

Yet what struck me the most was the hypocrisy and the ignorance of the upper class ‘posh people’ who proclaim that art “isn’t about the value” but will still pay a miner’s yearly wage for a rectangle with a circle and a square. Like the miners themselves I was scratching my head. As, unlike they had hoped, Shakespeare isn’t the privilege of the average Joe, neither indeed is art.

This month, Picasso’s Women of Algiers sold for £102.6m and £12bn worth of cuts were announced by the new government. People’s use of food banks has increased, and wages are at one of their lowest points. Prospects for the professional arts, never mind community projects, look bleak. But with canny, and may I note fully amateur, productions such as this at the Loft, we have some hope for the future.