CityLife

Interview: Lee Hall

The cast of The Pitmen Painters

IN 1934, a group of north eastern miners hired a professor to teach an art appreciation evening class.

Rapidly abandoning theory in favour of practice, the pitmen began to paint.

Within a few years, the most avant-garde artists became their friends and their work was acquired by prestigious collections. Yet every day they worked, as before, down the mine.

It might sound even more unlikely than a story about a young boy from a mining town who longs to become a ballet dancer and succeeds against all the odds, but The Pitmen Painters, the new show from Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall, is, astonishingly, a true – and wonderfully inspiring – story.

Or almost, admits Lee. “The most obvious untruth is that in my play there are only five members of the group. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the real story is that there were at least thirty people in the first register alone,” chuckles the Newcastle-born writer, who penned the show for his hometown’s Live Theatre, before seeing it picked up by the National Theatre. This in turn led to the national tour coming to The Lowry next week.

'Ordinary men'

“The inspiration to write The Pitmen Painters in the first place was purely accidental,” he admits. “I was in a bookshop down on Charing Cross Road in London and I saw this spine saying ‘Pitman Painters’. When I got William Feaver’s book down, it struck a chord somewhere in the back of my mind. I had heard about this real-life story growing up in Tyneside. I started to read the book in the taxi on the way home and I then rang Max, from Live Theatre, and said ‘I’ve found our next play’.

“The story embodies a lot of things I’ve been mulling over for years with this mix of miners and high art, like in Billy Elliot. Also, having had things go wrong with a lot of screenplays in the last ten years, I really wanted to do a stage play where people just talked,” he laughs. “Theatre does people talking really well so it seemed the perfect forum for a discussion of art, what it means to people’s lives and what its value is, ultimately.

“What struck me most about them was that, despite being a group of very ordinary men whose personal history had been harsh and brutal, including surviving war, personal tragedy and the scantest of educations, they wrote knowledgeably about Cezanne and Picasso. They were ardent devotees of Turner, Ruskin and Blake.

“I think the play raises questions rather than answers them, and the main question for me is very personal.

“When I was growing up in the same area, 40 years after the pitmen painters, it was considered very weird for me to like theatre and poetry and art.

“Why was that, when 40 years earlier there had been such a hunger and desire for it?

Cultural failure

“The more I investigated the pitmen and their environment, the more it seemed to me that something went wrong. The culture of ordinary life had been travestied somehow and we were accepting less and less in terms of culture.

“In the end, all of them decided not to become artists. They carried on making art but they stayed as miners. That makes it very different from Billy Elliot, of course. It was unthinkable for Billy to be able to do what he does and still remain part of that community.

“The working classes of the early part of the last century were aspirational about ‘high art’. They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture.

“That, 50 years later, I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to ‘high culture’, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure.

“That the group managed to achieve so much unaided should remind us that ‘dumbing down’ is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible.

“I’m not a snob. I don’t think everyone has to listen to Bach. But it does seem to me that a lot of ordinary people, because of where they come from or how they’re educated, are led to believe that art isn’t for them, and as a consequence the good stuff is kept for a small group of people. That seems wrong. We lose nothing by sharing.”

The Pitmen Painters is at The Lowry from October 27 to 31.