Dance

COAL

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Four Stars

If you didn’t already know that choreographer Gary Clarke grew up in the mining village of Grimethorpe, you’d soon sense - from the graphic physicality of the dance, the apposite use of spoken text, the live brass band on-stage - that COAL is deep-rooted in something familiar and personal to him.


However Clarke brings his take on the 1985 Miners’ Strike home to us too: the five musicians on-stage at Tramway are members of Kirkintilloch Band while four locally-recruited women join the feisty TC Howard as wives who marched out of the kitchen and onto the picket lines in support of their menfolk.

If this is a choreography of bygone actualities, Clarke’s urgent call to remember those times is also a reminder of how the politics of those events affected the whole country then, and since. When a caricatured Margaret Thatcher  - Eleanor Perry, in blue skirt suit, bouffant wig, gurning and clawing in Harpie-mode - stalks into the boisterous Gala Day celebrations, it may look like a pantomime spoof but the tragedy it initiates still resonates through countless lives today.

Watching the tiny, wiry Howard struggling to keep her crumbling, sagging, dispirited man (Alistair Goldsmith) on his feet and defiant in the face of defeat is, truly, heart-breaking.

Before then, Clarke has sent his five male dancers underground in a dim-lit, grimly convincing evocation of hard graft at the coal face. The sheer effort of repetitive hewing and shovelling soon has bare torsos sheened with sweat, Charles Webber’s canny lighting design focussing relentlessly on labouring muscles. The ever-present dangers become viscerally real for us, absorbingly powerful and affecting when male camraderie means life or death for a fallen mate - and dance, suddenly, tells it like it was for those  fighting to keep the pits themselves alive.