“You don’t want to become an artist, it’s a miserable existence”, says one grime-covered miner to the other. After an electrical explosion they’re trapped over a thousand feet under ground. They’re running out of food and water. “Miserable”, agrees the other. “Look at Van Gogh.” A beat. “Wanker.” Banter in spite of desperation that’s what Chris Urch’s first full-length play, Land of Our Fathers, which has now transferred into Trafalgar Studios, does best. What’s more, the funny lines and quips usually dig at something quite profound.
Even though we are in a collapsing mine in 1979, Land of Our Fathers is not an on the nose “politics in the mine”-play. Rather, Urch goes the indirect way and for example looks at the miners’ relationships with women (sisters, wives, girlfriends, with soon-to-be PM Thatcher only mentioned in passing) to show at how loss of labour and emasculation are interlinked. The future is taking shape around these miners and it poses a threat to old modes of manhood, brotherhood and camaraderie.
The idea of one of the characters escaping from his rural Welsh hometown to a London art school is set against the constant undercurrent of the shared experience of singing and music not as abstract art but as a real and comforting life-line among the mining community. Not all the themes of the play are as delicately balanced as this one and the production, first presented at Theatre 503 last year, maybe bites off a little too much as it puts its six characters into a pressure cooker: two brothers (a disparate pair, Lyle Rees as Curly and Taylor Jay-Davies as Chewy), a Polish war veteran, a brusque deputy, a craggy near-pensioner and a musical enthusiast who’s still wet behind the ears.
Charging from hope to despair and bouncing between jokes and accusations, the performers bring out the edges of their characters very effectively. It takes two and a half hours for these edges to hack away at the initial levity and for the men’s relationships, just like their surroundings, to collapse into utter chaos. With increasingly slimmer chances of rescue, the survival instinct rears its ugly head and it’s gruelling and captivating to watch how these men take each other apart. Robert East’s subtle performance as the quiet Hovis injects a composed stoicism that pulls focus into the human drama.
Enhanced by Simon Slater’s soundscape, Signe Beckmann’s design sees the small studio space transformed into a pit. Walls, ceiling and floor are covered with rough black textures turning the stage into a suffocating coal tunnel. Yet, there’s life in this uninhabitable death trap: soot-covered faces and torsos of the men that move around, orange jackets crumpled in corners and unlikely songs despite everything.
The slow build of the piece and a few predictable conflict developments sometimes stand in the way of its ambitions but Paul Robinson’s direction keeps the play’s pulse beating. However, the energy levels of some of the latter sections are perhaps less purposefully paced and therefore some of the motivations behind the longer monologues remain vague. Still, this doesn’t detract from Urch’s distinct voice which is able to create authentic characters and a remarkable historical and thematic scope within a limited setting.