Subject: RE: Alex Glasgow
From:
GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 16 May 01 - 05:14 AM
No obit yet but this from an old Guardian article may be of interest: Angels with dirty faces It started as a celebration and ended as an elegy to a lost world. Playwright Alan Plater describes the bizarre life of Close the Coalhouse Door
Alan Plater Guardian
Wednesday July 12, 2000
A third of a century ago, a meeting was convened in the Newcastle front room of the late Sid Chaplin, Durham pitman turned short story writer and novelist. Those present were singer-songwriter Alex Glasgow, director Bill Hays and myself - all native north-easterners. Indeed, I once said to a Labour MP during a radio interview: "I was born in Jarrow - beat that for credentials."
Sid gave us some stories, Alex wrote the songs, Richard Fynes's 1873 classic The Miners of Northumberland and Durham gave us all the history we needed, and inherited prejudice did the rest. I assembled the bits into a show called Close the Coalhouse Door, which opened in April 1968 at the old Newcastle Playhouse (later demolished in the cause of "road improvements") to rave notices and sell-out business.
On the first night my agent, Peggy Ramsay, grabbed my arm after and said: "My God, darling, this is revolutionary." Later, when the London managements came hot on its trail, she said it was much too tough for the West End. She was right. Brian Rix, a former Bevin boy, bravely put the show on at the Fortune Theatre to more rave reviews - the critics voted it the best musical of the year - and sparse audiences, most of whom I subsequently met.
It was when the revivals began that the project got a little complicated. The form of the show is the golden wedding party of Thomas and Mary Milburn. The guests reminisce about the history of their village and Brockenback pit (a real name Sid provided), starting in the 1830s and finishing in the present. The style of the piece begins with documentary realism, then drifts through vaudeville into a kind of unspoken surrealism.
In the third act Lord Hailsham turns up and sings a song called My Little Cloth Cap, closely followed by Harold Wilson with the words: "Good evening, brothers, I've just popped in to explain the government's fuel policy."
The problem was defining the "now". Ted Heath arrived on the scene and was written into the show, as were the successful miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974. I wrote the amendments for the 1974 Leeds Playhouse revival by candlelight, during the blackouts resulting from Sailor Ted's three-day weeks. But the narrative logic meant that our central couple, Thomas and Mary (named after my grandparents) became older and older and the show got longer and longer.
Arguably, the most adventurous version was performed by a fringe company from Wales, as a three-hander. They presented it as a radio play, with the three performers gathered around a microphone in the centre of the stage.
The most explosive was a production in Musselburgh, a (then) mining community east of Edinburgh, during the 1984-5 strike. At the end, the local colliery band marched in and lined up behind the actors, banners flying, for Alex's final sardonic chorus: "It's only a story - a fanciful tale."
I took part in an onstage discussion after the show with NUM and community representatives. British Coal had promised a spokesperson - presumably one of Thatcher's lesser lackeys - but he didn't show up. It was a wise decision.
The show continues to be performed by amateur groups and schools - even once in a prison - wherever there's a mining tradition. A decade ago, when working at the Australian Film School in Sydney, I had a call from a campus in Newcastle, New South Wales, to say it was on their syllabus and would I come to talk to staff and students about it?
So far, so nostalgic. At this point, one of my lesser fantasies takes over. My desk has a visit from a royal personage who accepts the flowers and says: "One must have seen a great many changes while one has been writing one's plays." To which one says: "You bet, babe."
For a start, when we were casting the original show, it was difficult finding actors who would admit to being Geordies. Bolton-born Bryan Pringle qualified by having an Auntie Bella in Gateshead.
On the other hand, we were able to afford a bigger and better cast because the BBC threw some money (memory says it was £400) into the stage production in exchange for the television rights which, in those days, meant a single showing on The Wednesday Play. The tape was apparently wiped long ago.
T hirty years on, the Geordie accent is part of our national culture and, according to research, is universally trusted. Robson Green, Kevin Whateley, Jimmy Nail and Tim Healy are bankable lead actors in the eyes of television executives.
Consequently, casting the most recent revival at Newcastle's Live Theatre was easy, except in terms of economics. Most regional theatres have lived on the breadline since the 80s. The original production had a cast of 11, plus a five-band brass ensemble. The revival had a cast of eight brilliant and versatile performers who played their own instruments. Both productions had a brass band on special occasions. We didn't bother to ask whether anyone would be interested in a television version.
So much for luvvie talk. What about the subject - the pits, the pitmen and their communities? It's no state secret. Thatcher and her imported hitman, McGregor, set out to destroy them and succeeded. In the latest, and probably last, version of the play, there's a brief exchange among the characters about the 1984-5 strike.
"The best ever. Because it wasn't about money."
"But we lost, didn't we?"
"It's still too early to say."
The cute people in Whitehall who are doing their best to remove the politics from politics would love us to believe that there are no longer such things as the working class, union solidarity or folk memory. To be sure, something very profound happens to a region when there are more art galleries than shipyards on the Tyne, when mining is something that happens in heritage museums, when disused pits are turned into dry ski slopes.
The industrial revolution is apparently over and our show, originally written as a hymn of praise to the miners, is now an elegy for a lost world. Memory becomes history and history becomes legend. But politicians should take note: legends endure and have a habit of making mischief in the debating chamber while the focus groups are taking a decaffienated coffee break.
The updated version of Close the Coalhouse Door is published by Bloodaxe Books at £7.95. RtS
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