Times they are a-changing. But in 1962, in a small mining community in South Yorkshire, the six members of the local close-harmony group are blissfully unaware that their way of life is about to be swept away by the youth revolution, by the economic changes that will see the mining industry die within a generation, and by their own discord.
Richard Cameron's wonderful play, salty and true, shows the men rehearsing their repertoire of light operatics and popular songs and showering at the pit-head. There is banter and male bonding, ribald jokes and sweat.
But the men's easy familiarity (and easy nakedness) disguises uncertainties. Cameron suggests that confusion about male (and female) roles and sexual identity is not an entirely modern phenomenon. These survivors of the second world war are also unsure where they stand in a world trembling on the brink of immense social change.
Family man Scobie finds himself dealing with his wife's postnatal depression and a teenage daughter whose burgeoning sexuality unsettles him; Jack rejects his loving, loyal wife for the teasing allure of the middle-class doctor's daughter, and Bant is eaten up with desperate fury and sexual jealousy over the wife who deserted him for another man. But it is the discovery that the Glee Club founder and pianist Phil is "more Liberace than Russ Conway" that signals that the end is nigh for the group. Their replacement at the miner's gala is a rock'n'roll band.
Cameron is one of those quiet, unsung playwrights who has always found the extraordinary in ordinary people's everyday lives, and here he does it with humour, compassion and with no trace of the patronising. If the second half seems slightly rushed, and the evening occasionally gives off the whiff of nostalgia that infects all memory plays, it hardly matters. Fantastic performances, an ingenious set and sharp direction add up to a package that gives audiences an evening of gritty pleasure. It deserves to run and run.
· Box office: 0870 890 1103.
