Pitmen's chorus

I had all the facts about 'The Pitmen Painters', Lee Hall's universally praised play about the Ashington Group, the group of miners from Ashington (north of Newcastle, our second hometown) who defied circumstances (1930s Britian was steeped in recession as well as its age-old class barriers) to become a celebrated school of painters. I knew the run at Cottsloe last year had been a huge success, and the current transfer to the much bigger Lyttleton had also been completely sold out. I had expected lots of near-impenetrable Geordie accents (thank goodness for our 3 years of living there) and lots of quick-witted dialogues (Hall has a real gift for colloquial rhythms). What I hadn't expected was the impressive amplitude and astounding quality of the miners' works (my ignorance) - nearly accenturating and complementing the plot on the three large slides - and how moving the play was.

The closing scene of Act I featured the five miner/painters upstage, in the centre, in turn delivering each line of the following prose (which, by nature of being prompted by each of the characters in print, automatically becomes beautiful verse) with increasingly focused lighting. This was their collective gut response to what they've seen on a pilgrimage to the great galleries in London, and the spontaneous announcement of their own arrival as a Group. Works of Cezannes, Blake, Turner and Van Gogh appeared on the slides, 'thick and fast' (Hall's stage direction), followed by early drawings of the miners themselves. Their reactions to the masterworks resonated with ours, and their emotions overwhelmed us by their sheer simplicity. A truly powerful moment.

You can take one set of things
some board, some paint, whatever
You can take this one set of things
and you can make them something else.
Whatever your circumstances
rich or poor
And you make them something else.
This is what art shows you.
No matter how hard or how easy
you can take things
and transform them.
You don't have to put up with what you're given
and not just into anything.
You can transform things and make something beautiful
something profound.
You can make something
That's the work of art
that you can change things.
And you can overcome whateber you need to overcome.
No matter who you are, where you come from
You need a brush
or whatever
canvas or bit of old card
and change things.
And that is what is important about art.
You take one thing
and you make one thing into another
and you transform
who you are.