In Celebration and Semi-Detached are both domestic explorations of mining communities. Photographs: Tristram Kenton and Martin Argles
A miner injured in a pit accident. A son wanting to be an artist. A small terraced house where nothing has changed for decades. Suddenly, Orlando Bloom walks in. That breaks the trance, all right. This revival of In Celebration, David Storey's semi-autobiographical 1969 play, has been glitzily recast, buffing up the Hollywood wunderkind's CV.
Sadly, Orlando doesn't bring anything much to Storey's concerns - conflicted families, a community in decline, grievance, guilt and slow, simmering resentment. And goodness, how they do go on: Pinter's The Homecoming this ain't. I longed for a pregnant pause, an ellipsis, a moment allowing a glimpse of something not said. Storey was working in a tradition that wanted to make sure that the audience got every single point, and so he ticked off each and every one, presumably for the hard-of-thinking.
Pinter made us lose patience with this style, and cinema has made it seem particularly cumbersome. Even before In Celebration, film-makers like Alain Resnais were playing with narrative structure, making their audiences work harder to create their own coherent timelines. We now make these leaps of imagination almost subconsciously in the cinema. Elision has become so commonplace, in film at least, that Storey's need to tell us everything is almost startling.
Time has also overtaken Storey's concerns. The father in this family drama is a miner who has spent 49 years down the pit and has bad lungs, an injured hand and a wonky heart. He's stubbornly refusing to retire because he wants to make the big 50, without which his life might seem to have no meaning - yet we know precisely how much meaning mining communities now have only another 40 years on.
Instead of sympathizing with the father's sense of impotence, I found myself spending much of the first act remembering Michael Landy's installation piece, Semi-Detached, at Tate Britain in 2004. Landy's piece was ostensibly simple: a precise replica of the front and back of his parents' semi-detached house, filled inside with two video screens. A miner who was injured in an industrial accident, Landy's father was housebound for nearly three decades. The video pans gently over his house's accumulated dust and clutter. Occasionally we hear a person moving around in the background - we assume it's Landy's father - and once or twice we see a pair of rheumatic hands.
Storey's miner fears the ultimate futility of a life he has spent moving his children on, educating them out of his world, away from his comprehension. The same notions of value and uselessness, work and purposefulness, are movingly shown by Landy without a single word being spoken. At the theatre last night I longed for the characters of In Celebration to just stop talking and think - allowing us to do the same.
