The rock glistens in Beth Steel’s play about the 1984 miners’ strike, and so do the miners’ bodies. There is a remarkable scene in Adam Penford’s impressive revival when, as news of the strike is spreading, the men soap the coaldust off each other under the showers. Their bodies gleam, small and insignificant against the monumental rock in Morgan Large’s superb design. But they are beautiful, full of quiet dignity as they reach out a helping hand to each other and scrub their backs clean.
Steel is a Nottinghamshire miner’s daughter. Beginning with the arrival of two raw recruits about to go down the mine for the first time, her play captures the banter, salty humour and camaraderie of men who risk their lives every day and rely upon each other. It also gets the measure of those waging the war against them – a war of ideology as an unseen Margaret Thatcher is determined to defeat the National Union of Mineworkers.
Steel is remarkably clear-eyed in her account of the strike: energy secretary Peter Walker is almost sorrowful as he observes “most of the cabinet thinks the coalfields are on Mars”; she pits the daily lives of the miners against the machinations of Thatcher’s adviser David Hart (Jamie Beamish), who conducted his campaign to get the miners back to work from a suite in Claridge’s.
This is a big play, ambitious in the way it melds the public and the private, full of heart and very little sentimentality. But it’s important, too, for the way it suggests that work and dignity go hand in hand, and points to the fact that the defeat of the miners was the moment when everything changed, paving the way for today’s labour market of zero-hours contracts and appalling working conditions.
“Without the women, we wouldn’t have lasted 11 weeks, let alone 11 months,” says one of the miners in Wonderland, and it is women who are the focus of Ray Castleton and Kieran Knowles’ play Chicken Soup, which begins one week after the bruising events of Orgreave and finishes on the day of the Brexit referendum.
Knowles explores the lives of two generations of women who have been shaped by the strike and its legacy. When Jo (Judy Flynn), Chris (Samantha Power) and Jennifer (Simone Saunders) set up a soup kitchen and hand out food parcels during the 1980s strike, little do they imagine that 30 years later they will be in the same community centre running a much-needed food bank.
“Thirty years of fighting and losing,” observes Chris, who bears her scars most clearly. She became estranged from her brother when he went back to work during the strike. Yet it is the resilience and enduring friendship of these women that is celebrated here, even when they find themselves having to settle for less than they want, always far less than they deserve. Like the men soaping each other’s backs, they are always there for each other.
- Wonderland is at Nottingham Playhouse until 24 February. Box office: 0115-941 9419. Chicken Soup is at Sheffield Crucible Studio until 3 March. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
