Review: Mining the emotions with a real brass band on stage

Call me a sentimental old fool but listening to the power of a real brass band is a terrific experience - in some ways even better in a confined theatre space rather than with notes blowing away on the wind.

Members of Coventry Festival Band are called in to augment this Touring Consortium production that is sadly only at the Belgrade, Coventry, until Saturday (April 26).

It’s a stage adaptation of the film, Brassed Off, which was truly poignant, although its music didn’t get the hairs on the back of my neck rising in the same way as this play with its William Tell Overture, Floral Dance and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

The year is 1992 and the brass band at Grimley Colliery has outlasted two world wars, a year-long strike and countless other threats.

John McArdle (Danny) and Andrew Dunn (Phil) lead a strong cast that includes the surprising fugelhorn-playing of actress Clara Darcy (Gloria). Most of the audience would have assumed she was miming. I checked, and she wasn’t.

The humour is sharp and the bittersweet action certainly has its moments, especially as the band marches through a series of village competitions, getting drunker by the minute.

Strong performances come from all the women while beer bellies and occasionally bare bottoms come from many of the men.

Although not from Luke Adamson, who has the job of playing eight-year-old Shane, the narrator who leads us through the real-life drama of a doomed mine that still has plenty of coal.

The pithead itself provides the the main prop for men rising from below ground and everyone has their hearts in their mouths as beleaguered, debt-ridden Phil climbs up to its top feeling he has nothing left to lose. I certainly would have lost out if I hadn’t seen this production.

Barbara Goulden