At last, it’s reached the West End. Lee Hall’s hit play, The Pitmen Painters, tells the heartening tale of some talented Geordie colliers who won national acclaim as artists during the 1930s. Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, has done extremely well from a pretty limited set of dramatic techniques. He draws each of his coal miners from a couple of opposed attributes: youthful but jobless; single-minded but foolish; erudite but insensitive; unhealthy but idealistic. His dialogue consists of gentle interrogations and nothing else. It’s like a cop show for kids. Every scene involves a misunderstanding — caused by ignorance, stubbornness or some cultural confusion — which has to be resolved by characters cross-examining each other. Once the conundrum has been explained, another one pops up. Very repetitive. The script is sprinkled with innocuous chumminess so the drama has lots of charm, of course, but absolutely no emotional weight.
When Hall looks for real passion all he can find is Marxist dogma and class prejudice. His world outlook is as complex as a Harry Enfield sketch. The poor are loyal, articulate and indomitably brave. The rich are aloof, pansyish, a bit thick but desperately keen to help. One of the aristocratic birds in this play has two of the silliest ‘posh’ lines I’ve ever heard. She meets the local pitmen and says to one, ‘You mean you’ve actually been underground? How awful!’ Later she tells her favourite miner, ‘You can’t help being working class.’
The play’s central action concerns an opportunity offered to this trusty pitman (played by the wonderfully lugubrious Trevor Fox) to abandon the mines and become a painter on better wages. Rather than jump at the chance he launches into an embarrassing rant about class-pride and class-loathing. Later, having made the wrong decision, he stages another rant about pride and loathing, this time varying it with a dose of confused self-laceration. It’s all desperately threadbare and dull. And here’s another unfortunate secret. The paintings, magnified on idiot boards over the stage, are mostly feeble and inept. The play ends like a church service with the miners standing beneath a union banner, supping light ales and singing hymns to socialist unity. And up flash the idiot boards again. Here the dreaded wording of Clause 4 appears along with the revelation that it was removed from the Labour constitution in 1995. Gasp! Grrr! The audience reacted as they’d never heard of this atrocity. Yet nearly all of them, I imagine, voted New Labour. That perhaps accounts for the mysterious popularity of this weepy, rose-tinted pageant. It’s an act of expiation for everyone who swallowed the Blair blarney.
At the New Diorama, a wonderful little theatre near Euston Rd, the playwright Julia Pascal has assembled the materials for a first-rate thriller. After the murders of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Golda Meir ordered a counter-strike, Operation Wrath Of God, to track down and kill all the escaped terrorists. By 1982, most had been wiped out and only the elusive ringleader remained. Enter a Swedish bombshell named Susanne. Half-Jewish, and suffering a weird religious crisis, Susanne offered to seduce and kill Arab targets on Israel’s behalf. These facts are Pascal’s starting point. She then shapes the material to suit her purposes. She gives Susanne a tricky relationship with her dead father (good, that helps us understand her motives), and makes her abandon her baby daughter in London (bad, that forces us to dislike her).
The first act examines the lengthy, and sometimes confusing, Mossad-training programme but the second act finds itself on surer ground. Susanne arrives in Paris and locates her man, a troubled, aging smoothie, in an upmarket hotel. And the inevitable happens. They genuinely fall for each other. Susanne finds herself drawn to this wise, lonely older gent and she begins to sympathise with his cause. And he, plummeting head over heels in love, starts to suspect that she’s an assassin. The lovers have to negotiate some pretty clunky gestures. The terrorist, in greased back hair and natty suits, specialises in toxic seduction lines. ‘I hef met many vimin,’ he tells her early on, ‘but nefr vun like you.’ Later, at an alfresco picnic in Parc Monceau, he decides to explain his unusual body scent. ‘In ze Galleries Lafayette, a zales-girl sqvolted me viz aftershave. I zmell like an olt whore! Ha ha!’
At the play’s climax, Susanne pulls out her hidden pistol and (contrary to the Mossad training manual, which specifies two kill shots, chest and head) offers her victim a chance to deliver a neatly crafted little speech. Gunfire then rings out. And the result? A mystery. Perhaps intentionally so. Somewhere in this mass of material lurks a brilliant play but, like the terrorist mastermind, it hasn’t been winkled out yet.
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