Blow Down opens with destruction. It’s 2022 and the last cooling towers of Ferrybridge power station are coming down. But despite this dramatic opening image, Garry Lyons’ new verbatim play is less about the power station and more about the erosion of the community around it. In Knottingley and Ferrybridge, it’s not just the iconic towers that have been demolished – they’ve lost their sports centre, their library, their social clubs. Everything is disappearing.
Through the voices of local residents, Lyons captures several decades of life in this community. We hear about the danger of work in the power station, the coal pits and the glassworks in a time before health and safety regulations, but also about the joy and camaraderie. The picture that emerges is a complex one. Residents mourn the closing of the power station and the nearby Kellingley colliery, while remembering how they broke the bodies of workers.
Though we get a strong sense of the place, the show is as much a portrait of Lyons’ interviewees and their idiosyncrasies as it is a study of the town. In the hands of a skilled cast, distinctive individuals come into focus: the man who worked for decades at the power station (Matthew Booth), the glassworker with crude stories to tell (Matthew Bugg), the restless jack-of-all-trades who’s done everything from playing in a band to fixing wind turbines (Luke Adamson), the pair of Scottish miners’ wives who have always made the best of things (Allison Saxton and Nicky Filshie).
This individuality is both the show’s strength and its weakness. While it allows for emotional connection, it also limits the range of perspectives and results in storytelling that sometimes lurches between disparate experiences. But Tess Seddon’s production does a good job of papering over these cracks, injecting dynamism into what could easily be static material. And as the testimony moves into the 21st century, it knits together into a fierce indictment of the government’s neglect of places like Knottingley. There’s anger throbbing beneath these memories and anecdotes – anger at the destruction of communities, which goes far beyond the demolition of a power station.
• At Leeds Playhouse until 11 February; then on tour until 4 March
