Picture this ... The Pitmen Painters at Newcastle's Live Theatre.
Lee Hall wrote Billy Elliot about miners and ballet, and now he's written a wonderful play about miners and art. The Pitmen Painters, which marks the reopening of Newcastle's Live Theatre, tells the story of some of the Ashington Group, the 20 or so miners at Woodhorn Colliery in Northumberland who for 40 years from the mid-1930s onwards recorded their lives and work in a series of paintings. These paintings by "unprofessional artists" - dancing with a real sense of lives lived hard and full - are at the very heart (via projected images) of Hall's play. They are also on permanent display at the Woodhorn Colliery Museum. I am determined to make the trip to see them as soon as I can.
Hall's play strikes me as important not just because it is a terrific piece of genuinely popular theatre, but also because it asks really difficult questions about who art is for and what role culture has to play in individual lives and contemporary society. These are questions we all need to ask ourselves, particularly at a time when funding for the arts hangs in the balance. The Arts Council talks a great deal about access and participation but here, back in the 1930s, was a group of working men who mostly left school before the age of 12 and simply reached out for the very best, took it and made it their own. They wrote and talked knowledgeably about both the old masters and modern painters, and they produced work themselves that stands shoulder to shoulder with the work of professional artists. The idea of high art didn't scare them and there were no arts professionals to give them access courses or suggest that the work of Ben Nicholson, Turner and Picasso had no relevance to their lives and they should try something less challenging. These men came into contact with the best, found the relevance for themselves and then made their own art.
Could that happen now? In an age of dumbing-down and an era where the artist is someone who makes things to be sold and art itself is a commodity (whether as part of the Saatchi collection or the "product" that theatre-makers increasingly talk about), it seems unlikely. Hall writes sorrowfully about this in the programme: "Quite clearly the Working Classes of the early part of the last century were aspirational about High Art. They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture. That 50 years later I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to High Culture, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure."
He goes on to point out that the welfare state and advances in education have entirely failed to democratise culture. It was a point that Dana Gioia, chairman of the US's National Endowment for the Arts, also made in a speech at Stanford last summer. Talking of his own upbringing as an immigrant kid, and the range of arts and ideas that he encountered growing up, he suggested that, "today no working class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated." Entertainment, of course, is mostly designed to sell us something - whether it is a book, a movie or Kate Moss's new perfume.
Gioia has a Stanford MBA, but nonetheless he recognises that "the marketplace does only one thing - it puts a price on everything. The role of culture however must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us."
In demonstrating how much the Ashington Group was able to achieve, Lee Hall reminds us that "dumbing down is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible. That is a lie perpetrated by those who want to sell us shit. Culture is something we all share and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it."
