Beth Steel’s emotionally super-charged rocket of a play Wonderland covers the agonising months of the miners’ strike of 1984/5.
It’s clearly a heartfelt polemic, directed masterfully by Edward Hall, pulling no punches about what Beth sees as the evil machinations of Margaret Thatcher , her almost manic adviser David Hart, the obsessive economist Milton Friedman and the blood and guts poetry of the miners themselves, portrayed vividly in words and song.
I grew up with the splendid Close The Coalhouse Door – a similar poetic polemic about the coalfields , but the politics in this re-enactment of the death of an entire industry is stronger, more direct and heart-wrenching in its many personal tragedies.
The cast are all outstanding – from Michael Cochrane as the steely Coal Board chairman Ian Macgregor, to Paul Cawley as a vicious , mendacious Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley, and Dugald Bruce-Lockhart as the oily, camp, flamboyant and highly dangerous Thatcher adviser Hart.
The actors portraying the miners, young and not so young all perform with a passion you can see in their eyes, and none more so than their underground leader The Colonel, played with sinuous physicality, roaring passion and poetry by Paul Brennan.
Staging of such a demanding setting is brilliantly designed by Ashley Martin Davis. We feel we are in the terrible, hot claustrophobic Hellish world of the coal seam- a wire lift cage dangles precariously above the stage , and steel mesh trapdoors open in the floor to swallow individual workers.
But this is no easy one-sided view of our recent industrial strife. The miners are conflicted among themselves and their genuine hardship leads to different attitudes to work and well-being.
The songs, by Simon Slater and the movement set by Scott Ambler – earthy as their work environment tell a tale of struggle, of pride, of unity, of destiny and ultimately of defiance against the inevitable “Out of the dirt and darkness I was born… Go down” sing the miners with gusto and no sense of the defeat to come, when King Coal is finally overthrown for a world of oil.
Wonderland can be streamed until Sunday 12 April on hampsteadtheatre.com
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