| Here is a request. When you have finished reading this, if you have web access, please go to the National Theatre site, www.nationaltheatre. org.uk, and click on The Pitmen Painters. You will find that it is sold out, but, by clicking the Pitmen Painters email list, you can contribute to the market research that will help to justify the transfer of the play to the West End.
You might want to do this because this is a brilliant play by Lee Hall, a co-production by Live Theatre, Newcastle, and the National. Like Hall’s more famous Billy Elliot, it also addresses the issues of art, masculinity, and social construct as they are played out for real in the life of the North East of England. In some respects, The Pitmen Painters takes these themes further and in a more interesting way, challenging the audience to address what it means to be human. So this is a production that more people should have a chance to see.
Hall’s play is inspired by the true story of the Ashington Group, miners who, in the 1930s, began to paint, and revealed remarkable talents. Their work and its significance was appreciated throughout the country, and they became respected commentators on the art of their day.
The play is fast-moving and funny, full of insights about an artistic flowering that is now on display in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum in Ashington, Northumberland. It traces the meetings of the Workers’ Educational Association from 1934, when Robert Lyon, a lecturer on art at the Newcastle campus of the University of Durham, arrived to address about 40 miners in the YMCA hall, Ashington. The miners had been hoping for geology or evolution, but got art appreciation, since no one else was available.
It must be to Lyon’s credit that he rapidly adjusted his approach from a commentary on slides of paintings they had never heard of to a practical art class. “Do it yourself,” says Lyon to the group. “It’s not about technical proficiency. It’s about understanding ‘why’ an artist makes the choice he does.”
The results are amazing. Oliver Kilbourn, the star pupil of the group that the play presents to us, stays up all night to complete his first painting. “I was shaking,” he tells us, “literally shaking — ’cos for the first time in my life, I’d really achieved something — not for someone else — not for money — not for anything, really.”
Writing in the programme, Mr Hall focuses on the damaging notion of art as a commodity. It is turned into part of our consumerist society, something we buy, show off, or rarefy, rather than something we can all do. In the doing of it, we make an important statement about ourselves: “you transform who you are,” says Oliver in the play.
Currents of pride and degradation characterise the pitmen painters’ assessment of their place in society. They live tough lives, but Oliver says to a wealthy potential benefactress: “I’m never gonna be like you. You are ‘them’ — I’m a pitman, and a bloody good pitman.”
This issue of identity is one that Rowan Williams has linked to the nature of baptism. In an essay about sacramentality and society, in Christ: The Sacramental Word (SPCK, 1996), Dr Williams illustrates the point by reference to the 16th-century Spanish theologians who debated whether the native peoples of America were human, and therefore capable of being baptised.
The consequence was that recognition of their spiritual capacity and eligibility for the sacraments implied eligibility for citizenship, making reduction to slavery that much more difficult for a colonising power to justify to itself. Dr Williams’s chilling rider to this is that it was an issue that also emerged in the British colonies of the 18th century.
Mr Hall also flashes before us something of the same pernicious effect of trade on spirituality and freedom. There is a brief appearance from the society artist Ben Nicholson in The Pitmen Painters. Oliver learns from Nicholson that “spirituality and painting are the same thing.”
But Nicholson is entrapped in a contractual relationship with a patroness.
We discover that the wealthy patroness is capable of turning this expression of human freedom into a commodity: “the Nicholsons are starting to fetch some very handsome prices” are almost her final words.
Lee Hall’s stand against turning art into a commodity seems to echo the Christian discipline of resistance to what St Paul terms conformity to this world. Painting, spirituality, inspiration, life in the Spirit — all belong to the same dimension of human experience which is derived from God, and is indicative of our capacity to bear the image of God. This, surely, is the justification for the New Jerusalem Bible’s rendition of Ephesians 2.10 as “we are God’s work of art” — otherwise translated “his workmanship” (AV) or “what he has made us” (NRSV).
Against the legacy of the First World War’s carnage and backdrop of the economic desolation of the 1930s, the Ashington Group presented images of their life that were uncompromisingly honest. Their initial outlook is summed up by one painter: “Listen, Mr Lyon. I’ve been in the Somme, I’ve seen lads blown to little bits. There is no God
. . . There’s nothing beautiful about living round here.”
Yet it is precisely as testimony of a human spirit that is resistant to this bleak analysis that the work of the pitmen painters exists. As Gerard Manley Hopkins had observed: “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
The Church might do well to identify with the vision of human flourishing which is narrated so authentically in the play. The themes of common interest are good news about the scope of being human; refreshment from the tyranny of commerce that mortgages our time, lives, and relationships to work and futile attainment; the recovery of an image of masculinity that has a distinctive and enriching contribution to make to a society wider than its own interests; and the richness of life and talent in the overlooked sections of our nation.
To all this we should be confident of contributing the liberating, hopeful narrative about God, revealed in Jesus Christ. In him, the transformation that the pitmen found in art is given the yet greater scope of fulfilment that is eternal life — abundant, beautiful, and free.
The Revd Dr Martin Warner is Canon Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral.
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