Lee Hall's "Pitmen Painters' on Broadway (2nd review)

Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters is based on William Feaver's non-fiction book about a group of English miners who literally rose above their circumscribed lives to become accomplished painters. It tells the remarkable story of unschooled pitmen who became known collectively as The Ashington Group.

The time is 1934 and the place is Ashington, a dreary mining town of 40,000 in the north of England. Courtesy of the Workers' Educational Association, the miners are offered the opportunity to take an art history class at the local YMCA. But their sympathetic instructor, Robert Lyon (played very well by Ian Kelly), realizes immediately that his students have no interest in looking at black-and-white slides of Renaissance masterpieces. Instead, they want to learn how to draw and paint in order to express themselves.

Over the next eight years, Lyon nurtures their innate creativity as well as their careers. He introduces the miners and their work to a wealthy society matron and art collector, Helen Sutherland (Phillipa Wilson), who, in turn, not only buys their work but also arranges for it to be exhibited.

Although the real group comprised about a dozen miners, the play focuses on a core group of five, one of whom is actually a dental technician. We follow their progress by way of color slides projected on a large screen suspended on the stage.

Art with a message

The painters represent various viewpoints. Harry Wilson believes art should serve a social and political purpose; Jimmy Floyd doesn't believe that art must deliver a message. The most fleshed-out character is Oliver Kilbourn (Christopher Connel), who is offered a stipend by Mrs. Sutherland that would allow him to quit the mine and paint in her studio, following in the footsteps of her current protégé, Ben Nicholson, who goes on to acquire fame and fortune.

Over the course of two and a half hours, the play offers much talk about the meaning and nature of art. And while this discourse is at times pedantic, it's also engaging and entertaining. The audience comes to know and care about the destinies of the characters. The miners' paintings not only illustrate the hard lives of pitmen; they're also beautiful works of art in their own right. For me, they are the shining stars of the play.

Echoes of Hopper

Following a matinee performance, I went to see "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Times," at the Whitney. The best work of the Pitmen Painters compares favorably, in my opinion, with that of well-known social realists like Thomas Hart Benton, Raphael Soyer, Robert Henri, George Bellows and even, in some cases, Hopper himself. The most striking difference between the Ashington Group and the Ashcan School is the miners' relative lack of brilliant color in their paintings— a forgivable omission, given that their native landscape was covered with coal dust.

Hopper wrote this about his fellow artist Charles Burchfield: "From what is to the mediocre artist and unseeing layman the boredom of everyday existence in a provincial community, he has extracted a quality that we may call poetic, romantic, lyric or what you will. By sympathy with the particular, he has made it epic and universal." The same words apply to the protagonists of The Pitmen Painters. ♦


To read another review by Toby Zinman, click here.