Christopher Gray is dazzled by a rarely seen Scottish play

‘One day we will get our own back.” This grim statement of intent from a miner’s wife in a Fifeshire community being starved into submission by the local coal barons reveals the powerful political dimension to Joe Corrie’s play In Time O’ Strife, first performed in 1926, the year of the General Strike.

And indeed the miners’ revenge, of a sort, was to be supplied 20 years later following Labour’s nationalisation of the industry. Fuel Minister Manny Shinwell’s spiteful orders for open-cast mining up to the very doors of Wentworth Woodhouse, the country’s largest house, belonging to the mine-owner Earl Fitzwilliam, is one example.

But ultimately the pitmen were to lose. The National Theatre of Scotland’s blistering revival of Corrie’s work is designed to mark the 30th anniversary of the Thatcher government’s victory in the Miners’ Strike of 1984.

Corrie, an undeservedly neglected figure, was a miner himself, whose plays were written to help finance the soup kitchens during the series of protracted pit strikes of his time. They were everyday scenes of mining life in the main, and he deliberately avoided the sort of agit-prop theatre then becoming fashionable. There is a definite irony therefore in the way the play has been transformed into just such a work. Mind you, no-one could be other than glad to see that it has.

As the adapter, director and designer, Graham McLaren delivers a production in barnstorming, Brechtian style. Corrie’s story, focusing on two mining families many months into a crippling strike, is presented as if performed at an unspecified later period by amateur actors in a village hall. Behind them are ranged four musicians who provide music (composer Michael John McCarthy) by turns pounding and poignant.

Thrilling wild dances, sometimes illustrative of miners’ backbreaking labour, punctuate the action. These are choreographed by Imogen Knight whose amazing work in the Old Vic’s recent Crucible and the RSC’s Arden of Faversham marks her out as a major figure in the theatre world of today.

Though strong Scottish accents and much dialect sometimes make the nuances of the story hard to follow (would surtitles help?), the tremendous power of the acting cannot be denied.

Hannah Donaldson excels as a young woman loyal to the strike who must make agonising decisions when her boyfriend (Owen Whitelaw) turns blackleg. John Kazek, Anita Vettesse and James Robinson all rivet attention too as, respectively, her fiercely determined father, mother and brother, Bob. Bob’s girlfriend Kate (Vicki Manderson) forges the link to a second family whose paterfamilias (Tom McGovern) has to face the heartbreak of watching his wife literally starve to death.

This is theatre at its best.

In Time O’ Strife
Oxford Playhouse
Until Saturday
01865 305305 oxfordplayhouse.com