Lee Hall's 'Pitmen Painters' on Broadway (1st review)

The new Broadway season begins with a (wait for it) transfer from England. The Pitmen Painters, a hit both in Newcastle and then in London, arrives cast intact, extreme accents likewise. The play contains enough ideas—political and aesthetic—and enough charm to please any crowd, although its second act becomes less charming and more preachy.

The "pitmen" are miners in the north of England; in 1934 there were 1.2 million men working in coal mines in conditions that they themselves acknowledged to be terrifying most of the time. Most of them had started working when they were ten or 11 years old, and that was the end of their education. So the men form an organization and hire a professor to teach them about art. None of them had ever seen a painting.

All of this is based on a true story, and playwright Lee Hall found his inspiration in a book written by William Feaver after the miners' paintings— which came to be called The Ashington Group— had been exhibited throughout Britain and Europe.

Lee Hall is best known for Billy Elliot—another story of the transformative power of art in a northern England mining town. But nothing quite as breathtaking as Billy Elliot's thrilling leap into Swan Lake takes place in The Pitmen Painters. In fact, whether anyone is actually transformed is a question Hall asks but fails to quite answer.

Titian won't cut it

It quickly becomes evident that the miners' tutor, Robert Lyon (Ian Kelly), with his posh accent and artbabble about Renaissance masters, needs a new approach: slides of Titian won't work for these guys. So Lyon asks them to paint pictures— each week on a new topic. The results (displayed onstage, both on easels and projected on a screen) are often bizarre, delightful and impressive.

Liberated from constraints of technique and trends and expectations, the miners paint as the spirit moves them; when the week's topic is "Deluge," nobody picks up on the expectable Biblical theme; instead the men interpret the flood as they wish. Jimmy (David Whitaker), a lovable dolt, produces a painting of a Bedlington terrier: "I started doing a deluge, but it turned into a dog."

A Marxist's agenda

The miners wrangle about what each picture means: George (Deka Walmsley) is tyrannically rulebound, while Harry (Michael Hodgson), who's a Marxist, wants everything to have a point.

The Young Lad (Brian Lonsdale— who doubles as the artist Ben Nicholson, with a radical alteration in accent and posture) is desperately unemployed and more or less ignored and patronized by everyone else. He finally makes a huge discovery when he finds a picture of Picasso's Guernica in a magazine. The Young Lad intuitively grasps Picasso: He gets the anger and beauty, and then, responding to that monumental painting, he enlists in the army.

The most talented and deeply artistic of the miners is Oliver (Christopher Connel), who is profoundly moved by his experiences of seeing and making art, and is ultimately regretful that his class loyalty prevented his life from being transformed.

Elitism in art

The Pitmen Painters raises issues about "outsider art" (the very label speaks volumes about the elitism of the art establishment, its exploitation of the "folk" who make "folk art," and England's rigid class system). It also raises enormous questions about Britain's post-World War II hopes for nationalization (of the mines, of education, of health services) and the subsequent failure of British socialism.

Under the direction of Max Roberts, on a nearly bare stage with a terrific clanging sound design by Martin Hodgson to evoke the miners' work, The Pitmen Painters finds a way to present art and theories about art on stage. When the men visit an exhibit of Chinese art in London, their tutor dismisses the pictures for their lack of perspective, while George makes this fine declaration: "But that's what I like about them. You know with perspective everyone's looking at everything from one fixed point. But when there's no perspective, nothing's fixed— you can come to the painting from wherever you like."

And that, I think, is what Lee Hall has tried to do with this play: to give us a play without any one fixed perspective. In the concluding scene, Harry discovers the true pleasure of freedom— through art, not politics: "Nobody telling us what to paint. No master but ourselves."♦


To read another review by Jane Biberman, click here.