The sweating, dust-glazed saints at the Hampstead Theatre tells us nothing new about the miners’ strike

Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production there’s a clanking great iron chute that stubbornly refused to go up and down when ordered. A bit like the miners.

The writer, Beth Steel, is a collier’s daughter and she romanticises the pit workers to the point where they seem like an exotic species of humming bird. Brave, high-minded and selfless, these noble sons of toil go marching off to the pithead every day to hack and burrow their way through the depths of hell. Into the elevator they trudge, their shovels resting on their shoulders, their voices uplifted in song. The platform shudders and falls away and their torch-crested helmets create little cones of blue-grey brilliance that dance prettily in the pit’s cavernous gob. Twelve hours later, they re-emerge from the bowels of the earth, mired and gleaming, and still trilling the same hearty chorus, but by now arranged in eight-part harmony. The devil himself would hesitate to raise a hand against these sweating, dust-glazed saints.

Opposing them is Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet along with various allies and freelance interlopers. Ms Steel, to her credit, resists the temptation to turn the Tories into a gang of demonic clowns, and she draws Peter Walker, Nicholas Ridley, and the coal-board boss, Ian MacGregor, as intelligent and pragmatic men. But because the play sticks so closely to the historical timeline it deprives itself of suspense or uncertainty. The strike starts, it continues, it gets nasty, it continues a bit more. Then bam. A whirlwind arrives in the shape of David Hart, an eccentric Etonian dilettante, who tours the collieries in disguise, encouraging strikers to return to work, and trying to foment splits within the NUM.