The Bush kicks off its 30th season with a cracker: a ribald, touching, song-filled play by Richard Cameron that, even though it has echoes of Billy Roche's The Cavalcaders and Peter Gill's The York Realist, still possesses its own authentic voice.
Cameron's setting is south Yorkshire in 1962. His characters are all members of a colliery glee club working under the musical direction of a mining engineer called Phil Newsome.
The chosen period gives Cameron the chance to counterpoint nostalgia-inducing standards, such as Que Sera Sera, with a sense of a society on the brink of profound musical and social change. But the group faces its own internal disruption when Phil, who doubles as church organist, is accused of misconduct with choirboys. And what we see is how the miners' solidarity is subject to private stresses when Phil admits he is gay.
Intriguingly, Cameron takes a different line from The York Realist: where Peter Gill suggests the attitude to homosexuality in 1960s Yorkshire was one of familial acceptance, Cameron exposes a residual working-class prejudice. But his larger point is that all these miners are sexually complex figures.
One, a macho scrapper called Bant, is the club's drag comic and full of love for his fellow-miners. Jack, is hung up on a doctor's middle-class daughter. Even the procreative Scobie seems preoccupied by his daughter's love life. Cameron implicitly endorses a point made recently by Antony Sher: that heterosexuals are very queer.
What makes the play a comedy, however, is the way these messed up men launch into passionate close-harmony renderings of romantic ballads. And much of the charm of Mike Bradwell's ebullient production lies in the skill with which the memory-tampering songs are delivered. There are also first-rate performances all round. David Bamber shows how the persecuted Phil acquires confidence once seated behind the piano. David Schofield captures all the sexual confusion of Bant, hooked on his defecting wife yet committed to the group's male ethic. Shaun Prendergast catches Scobie's mixture of instinctive decency and obstinate sexual prejudice.
For a decade Cameron has been writing richly promising plays seen mainly at the Bush: I'll be astonished, however, if this exhilarating piece doesn't make it into the wider, commercial world.
· Until March 23. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
