I went to see a fantastic play on Friday called The Pitmen Painters at the Duchess Theatre. Written by Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame and a Geordie, it was set again in the North of England, this time in Ashington. The play told the remarkable true story of the Ashington Group, miners with very basic education, who having studied Geology now wanted to learn art appreciation.
To their teacher's astonishment, none of them had seen any art at all, whether in real life or in a library. Indeed, few miners had ventured beyond their home town. They were unimpressed with their tutor's slideshow of famous paintings, demanding to know what the paintings meant and how they could work it out each time.
Their tutor had the novel idea of getting the miners themselves to paint, so that they could understand better the nature of art by commenting on each other's paintings. And so began the creation of a body of art never seen before - art based on the town of Ashington and the mines. Art that had been unschooled in form and style, that sought instinctively to represent a life and a point of view.
The play also has some poignant political messages - it not only casts a gentle satire on the Pitmen Painter and union leader miner obsessed with regulations - but also marks some of the political and cultural changes from before WW2 to the 1990s. It heralds the introduction of a free national health service and the nationalisation of the mines. It then marks the closure of the mines under Thatcher and the removal of the clause from the Labour Party which demanded ownership of the means of production. At a time when many are seeking a left alternative to the social crisis this country is facing, the play makes the interesting point that the present Labour Party is very different to the Labour Party that brought in Clement Atlee's wonderful NHS and welfare system.
The joy of the play is in the vernacular humour, in the wonderful paintings and in the teaching of art appreciation. I, along with the miners, learnt about how one can analyse art, how the 'meaning' of art lies in the relationship between the viewer and the painting and may not be known to the painter himself, how often the meaning may lie in what is not painted as well as what is.
I thoroughly recommend the play as an opportunity to learn about art and an opportunity to experience the lifestyle of a now non-existent group, yet one which was common to England not so long ago, the life of miners in the North of England. Their's was a world which felt immensely alienated from middle class society and middle class artists, despite one art collector's attempts to destroy the barriers between them. The result is a unique type of art and a very moving, engaging and authentic play.
