My People

Miners are my people. They made and moulded me. I am proud of the fact.

If Billy Elliot had been a painter. . .
Lee Hall, creator of the famous boy dancer, has written a play about real-life artistic miners. He talks to John Whitley.

Lee Hall is a playwright with a gift for the improbable.

After inventing characters who range from a dumb adolescent and an Elvis impersonator to a pit-village ballet dancer called Billy Elliot, his latest play features a group of 1930s coalminers who become successful artists.

Lee Hall addresses the culturally disenfranchised working class.The difference is that Pitmen Painters is all true.

Hall's two-act play, which reopens the expanded Live Theatre on Newcastle's quayside after its £5.5 million refit, tells the story of the Ashington Group- 30 or so miners and their colleagues, whose wary attendance at art appreciation classes in this Northumberland mining village in the '30s propelled them into becoming artists in their own right.

Some of their work, such as Oliver Kilbourn's oils, even attracted comparison with Sickert.

"Virtually all the events in the play are true," says Hall, sturdy, bespectacled and himself Newcastle born and bred.

"They really did go to London and hang out with famous artists and their work did attract big collectors. They learned the language of that world.

"Their lives seemed to make a good subject for this theatre, a way of investigating some of the problems that culture brings if you're coming from outside of it, as these guys clearly were. It's a sort of parable. Of course, having written about miners and ballet, this didn't seem too big a stretch!"

Hall promised his play to the Live Theatre because "it's where I learnt about theatre. It started out as a touring company, taking mainly plays about working-class life round the North East to non-theatrical spaces.

"They put on people like C P Taylor and when I followed in that tradition they did some of mine, including read-throughs. That was a tremendous help for a writer. Especially of screenplays, because you can see an audience's reaction.

"In fact, my screenplay for Billy Elliot had its first public airing there, with an audience. There'd been quite a lot of resistance before and I think that reading encouraged the backers."

Although Hall has notched up a clutch of screenplays and a residency with the Royal Shakespeare Company since devising Billy Elliot, it's with that Oscar-dazzling script that his latest piece is most obviously linked.

This goes much deeper than the shared North-Eastern setting: both, points out Hall, are about the barriers that cut off the working class from experiencing the arts and the blossoming that can result from exposure to true culture.

"What interests me is that there are effectively two languages. There's the middle-class, confident one talking about art or music or dance, and then there's a quite different one used by the people who just don't understand it, and the first language sort of cuts the rest of the world off from culture. If those people are disenfranchised, then that culture's a failure."

Significantly, the model for Billy, the dancer, came from just such a world - the great baritone Sir Thomas Allen, born at Seaham, just down the coast from Newcastle.

"It was the inspiration for that sort of career," says Hall.

"I've never met him, but I've always been interested in music and so I knew about what he'd done. The actual starting point, though, wasn't to do with singing, it was this surreal image I had one day in the bath of a kid in a tutu against this bleak landscape.

"The basis of the script was my own experience. I grew up in an environment that had a suspicion and distrust of any intellectual activity, of any attempt to be objective about life or art. That conservatism, that philistinism within the working class was at the root of Billy Elliot. And it was reinforced by the philistinism of the Thatcherite years."

His own escape, fostered by his association with Live Theatre, took Hall from a comprehensive school to Cambridge to study English and dream of a career in theatre.

Learning his trade at the Sheffield Crucible, he met Stephen Daldry and began the bumpy road to Hollywood.

Now, at 41, he's married to a film director himself and established in north London, but it's clear that Hall remains deeply marked by the miners' strike of 1984-5 and the devastation it wrought in the close-knit communities of the North.

"Strangely, the musical version of Billy Elliot is a lot more about the community. I much preferred it -- it's a richer experience and certainly deals with the strike and the prospects of de-industrialisation very clearly. Some of that got lost in the film."

Living 50 years before either Billy or Arthur Scargill's Götterdämmerung, the Ashington pitmen's strength lay in this sense of community, despite its innate conservatism, and it's striking that, in the end, the most promising of the debutants chooses to renounce an artistic career and stay with his fellows at the pit.

Yet the pit village's structure worked to their advantage, with its tradition of seriousness and self-help that extended to the WEA (workers' education) classes where they first heard about the wonders of Cézanne and Henry Moore.

"They were aspirational about high art," argues Hall.

"They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture. That 50 years later I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to high culture, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure.

"We've got this divide, that existed for the Ashington miners and is still there today, between what one lot of people seem entitled to in terms of culture and another lot aren't. There's this terrible lie perpetrated by those who sell us this rubbish that only certain people can have access to great culture and the rest don't need to know about it and wouldn't like it if they did."
But if all Hall's work is driven by the political astringency of the radical Left, this certainly doesn't make it dull.

He's a great believer in the power of comedy: "Comedy has to be shared, it's an expression of communal feeling and I'm making something that people share rather than just expressing myself."

Like Alan Bleasdale and Alan Bennett, Hall can hark back to a tradition of wry Northern humour to leaven his message:

"There is a particular Northern voice, one that understands the absurdities of the world and comes across in a comic way. You can use it to make political points just as they used to in variety shows.

"The most objective thing in theatre is the laugh - it's almost a physical reaction to your work. It's a very comforting sound."

For his next play, though, a National Theatre commission, Hall is shifting to a different sort of Northerner and a different sort of community: the bohemian boarding house set up by W H Auden in the 1940s in New York's docklands, where the poet was joined by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears as well as Chester Kallman.

It's a combination that has all the improbability of his earlier work and the promise of plenty of comedy.

Pitmen Painters opens at the Live Theatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (0191 232 1232), on Sept 20.