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Thursday 4 December 2008

‘Seeing by doing’

William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National

Two years ago in the Charing Cross Road, Lee Hall came across a copy of Pitmen Painters, my book on the Group, first published in 1988, and decided that here was a story of touching significance, local and universal. For dramatic economy he cut down the class size from 20 or so to five. The characters bear the original names but, understandably, have exacerbated characteristics. Ian Kelly’s ‘Robert Lyon’ is slightly less officer material, I suspect, than the original. Oliver Kilbourn, as I knew him, could have been played by the equally elderly Alec Guinness but on stage he’s a young man and, besides doing the Ashington accent proud, Chris Connel brings out his thirst for knowledge and pride in accomplishment. His frustration, too. As Oliver wrote to me once: ‘I think it may be because life was so terribly hard in those days that we may have thought surely something good must come out of all this endurance.’

The National Theatre exhibition Ashington Group: The Pitmen Painters runs from 19 May until 25 June, and the play opens at the Cottesloe on 21 May.

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