UK Theatre Network

Real art belongs to everyone.

 Produced by Newcastle's acclaimed Live Theatre and following sell-out seasons at the National Theatre and on Broadway, The Pitmen Painters is now touring the UK prior to opening in the West End. Written by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame and directed by Max Roberts The Pitmen Painters has won the Evening Standard award for Best New Play. 

In 1934, a group of Ashington miners hire a tutor, Robert Lyon, to teach an art appreciation class.  Lyon quickly realises that an academic survey of Renaissance art is unlikely to hold his pupils’ interest as most of them had to leave school at the age of 11 and have never been to an art gallery. Once he has changed his course plan from having his students merely looking at art to actively creating it, the pitmen eagerly enter dialectical debate about the meaning of art. Their work first attracts the attention of Helen Sutherland, a local shipping heiress, who collects modern art and confronts the miners with paintings by Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. Within a few years the most avant-garde artists become their friends and their work is exhibited in major art galleries.

  

 Lee Hall has written a social document that can be considered an attack on the injustice and absurdity of the recent cuts in arts funding and education. Although Hall clearly states that art cannot change society, only political action can, his play makes it quite clear that the arts are for everyone and should not be restricted to the middle and upper classes. Hall’s play is funny, touching and poignant. The debates about the truthfulness and meaning of art do not obscure the harsh reality of the  miners’ lives. Yet there are very comical scenes as well such as the scene when the budding artists find themselves face to face with a female life model.

The outstanding cast includes Trevor Fox as Oliver Kilbourn, the most talented of the Ashington miners, who has to choose between loyalty to his group and private patronage, Deka Walmsley as the meticulous local official, Michael Hodgson as the Marxist dental mechanic who would rather do a course in economics but sees the merit of political art, and David Leonard as the inspirational tutor who will abandon the group that launched his career in academia.

Until 16 July 2011

Richmond Theatre
The Green
Richmond
Surrey
TW9 1QJ

Box Office
0844 871 7651

http://www.atgtickets.com/1070/659/Richmond/Richmond-Theatre/The-Pitmen-Painters-Tickets