Like good Yorkshire tea, Bryony Lavery’s new play, Queen Coal, has been a while in the brewing. Determined to work with Robert Shaw Cameron – as director, rather than actor – she found they shared “strong, furious attitudes” to the miners’ strike of 1984-85. What particularly angered the Yorkshire-born pair was “the right’s continued reshaping of [the strike’s] truth”. In April 2013, as they researched their subject, Margaret Thatcher died: “In London, a ceremonial funeral was held,” says Lavery in the programme notes. “In Yorkshire, her effigy was burned on a bonfire.”
It is the eve of Thatcher’s funeral. The audience sits around a coal-covered stage. Pieces of furniture suggest a living room, a kitchen. In Yorkshire, a former mining family reunites to celebrate. Lavery’s action shuttles between this moment and the last time they were together, nearly three decades ago. Max Jones’s extraordinary design, illuminated by Jason Taylor’s lighting, makes molten transitions between picket line and hearth, heath and pit.
In short scenes, sheared by blackouts, the characters initially semaphore information to the audience via pithy exchanges – sometimes directed at one another, sometimes directly out to the auditorium (Shaw Cameron’s economical direction conveys maximum impact). We gradually learn how the strike ruptured relationships: between Justine and Ian, her husband; between Justine and Ian’s sister, Maggie; between each of them and their former selves; between all of them and the world they thought they knew. As they prepare their bonfire, they evade, confront, understand, accept and deny the pain of the past, smouldering in the present.
Julia Ford’s Justine, returning from London, is all flickering hesitancy and sudden flares; Kate Anthony is incendiary as Maggie, furious at what she sees as Justine’s betrayal; David Hounslow is powerful as Ian, trying to dampen destructive passions and foster reconciliation. There is power here, for sure, but the writing remains too constrained by its own good intentions and the ending, while spectacular, comes across as contrived.
Queen Coal is at the Crucible, Sheffield until 22 November
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The Shape of the Table review – David Edgar’s power play proves prophetic
Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’
