Dust theatre review: Coal, conflict and survival
Charlaina Thompson’s play is a powerful solo piece about a Yorkshire miner whose life is shaped by hardship and love
It’s extraordinary to think that decades of working-class culture and practice can be wiped out in just a handful of years, thanks to the actions of a callous government. And it’s even more extraordinary for those who lived through the height of the coal industry and the conflicts that killed it in the UK in the 1980s to realise that the memories of those times are also fading.
Not that it’s right to romanticise what was a dirty, dangerous way of life; thankfully a trap that Dust avoids. This solo play tells the story of an unnamed man, an everyman, a Yorkshireman. Handy with his fists, quick to tip into temper, we follow him through his life, from national service, where he learns his trade as a boilermaker, to back home where he meets his wife, Dot, through to losing his job. The pit then beckons, a place he recognises as a maw of danger and darkness. But what’s a man to do with five mouths to feed?
Charlaina Thompson’s play interweaves past and present and does not flinch from pain. Recurring scenes of the character fighting for his last breath are threaded through the action; but hasn’t he been fighting for breath for his whole life? A detailed, evocative language peels back the layers to expose the forces of oppression that form the man, just as the pressures of the earth form coal.
Performer Craig McArdle, as Yorkshire as tea and toast, is well able for the challenges this twisty script throws up: supple, never less than fully energised, he roams the stage, spitting out anger that has nowhere to go, saved only, we sense, by his love for Dot who he brings to life with the crook of an arm, the tilt of his head, the lilt of a song. This gem of a play directs the full beam of its light on an industry that, truly, was no good for anyone while holding the correct people to account for its ultimate demise in a fascinating slice of history that deserves to be seen.
Dust concludes at The Mill on March 7.