Around the end of the 1990s, three popular movies about the ravages of Thatcherism on working-class communities all featured characters finding solace in culture. In Billy Elliot, it was an escape through dance. In The Full Monty, it was nightclub stripping. And in Brassed Off, it was the power of music.
Of the three, Brassed Off has the gentlest emotional arc. Its heart is in the right place, though it has none of the gender subversiveness of Billy Elliot and not quite as much bleak despair as The Full Monty. It finds a metaphor for industrial decline in the story of a colliery brass band whose fate is tied to the survival of the pit. Ten years after the miners’ strike, the band is an expression of a community under threat.
The big advantage of putting this on stage, in Paul Allen’s adaptation of Mark Herman’s screenplay, is you get to hear the music live. Here it is the Penrith town band giving the show warmth and plangency, a mood of mournfulness even in the jolliest tunes. They are also a symbol of collective enterprise, as all ages come together to create a beautiful sound.
This sense of community is reflected by a reconfigured auditorium at Theatre by the Lake with the audience sitting on four sides. It is a practical decision for a show co-produced by the in-the-round theatres in Bolton and Scarborough, but it also chimes with a story about the impact of political decisions on a whole village: those who stand up for class solidarity, those who buckle under the offer of redundancy money, and those carried along by the tide of history.
Director Liz Stevenson draws out the life of the fictional Grimley (a stand-in for Grimethorpe) in a production alive with movement. Bicycles, shopping trolleys and suitcases wheel across a stage on which a suitably hard-bitten ensemble creates a world of coal-not-dole protesters, boozy music competitions, young love, domestic stress and thankless manual labour, all underscored by economic precariousness.
It finishes with a rousing broadside against ruinous Tory policies by bandleader Danny (Russell Richardson), but the music has an eloquence of its own.