A common pursuit

After Sunday's yawn inducing rendering of amateurs with artistic aspirations ("The Common Pursuit"), I was delighted to discover that the Ashington colliers in Lee Hall's "Pitmen Painters" had a far more interesting story to tell.

These 1930s Geordie miners escape their daytime toils in a weekly nightclass. Having sampled psychology and failed to find an economist, they are lumbered with the RP spouting naif Robert Lyon who offers them classes in Art Appreciation and under his tutorship they begin to create their own paintings for the appraisal of the group.

The delight in this simple production, which was first seen at Newcastle's Live Theatre and has now transferred to the Cottesloe with the original cast, is the engaging ensemble performance combined with unobtrusively projected original images of the paintings created by the eponymous artists.

Any elaborate set is dispensed with in favour of half a dozen wooden chairs and three projection screens on which the images referred to in the plot are displayed. Intermittently we are also given brief phrases describing each enacted scene, in the same way that a title might be displayed alongside a painting in a gallery: "Oliver borrows books", "Rock Hall 1938" and "Newcastle Central Station".

In a lengthy first half we are introduced to the five men who each use their newfound joy of painting to depict their difficult working lives and modest surroundings. Among them Oliver Kilbourn is the most talented of the group and is offered the chance to move out of his working class roots to a life of patronage. His fear that aspiration might take him away from his fellows is heartbreakingly portrayed by Christopher Connel. In contrast Lyon, already believing himself to be of a greater class, although hilariously dismissed as "a middle-brow provincial realist", continues to aspire: he abandons his protégés for a post in Edinburgh, having documented their achievements in a professorial dissertation. 

For me the most moving scenes came just before the interval. FIrstly, the men contradict Lyons' assertion that their work proves that "anyone" - the implication being that even the working classes - can appreciate and create art. Secondly the men's genuine appreciation of the Masters they saw in London, I felt, was overwhelmingly sincere.

There were faults. In Act II a scene in which Lyon is seen sketching Kilbourn was beautifully done, but over-long. And a political rant at the end of the play by a die-hard Socialist about his hopes for the future under Labour and nationalisation was excessively preachy, ending the show with a hymn from the Durham Miners' Gala and a footnote about New Labour's abandonment of Clause IV in 1995. 

The show, in parts, reminded me of the more moving and political passages in Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George". That too was stronger in its first half, telling the true life tale of an artist struggling to express himself. It too has a strong political point in its second act and in the recent London revival (now on Broadway) makes effective (albeit rather more complicated) use of projection. 

It is impossible not to draw comparison too with Hall's more previous work "Billy Elliot", either the film or the musical play. As "Pitmen" ends, nationalisation is seen as a post war panacea; "Billy" begins as that aspirational project is dismantled and, tragically for the Northern working class community depicted, in fifty years, the same prejudices are found. In the 1930s the painters might use art to improve their lot, and in the 1980s version it is a young ballerino pirouetting against the grain.

There is talk of a West End transfer. Here's to a film too.