Boff Whalley’s “musical comedy” was initially commissioned, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, by the commerce union Unite, which additionally helps this revival. Set in a pit village, outlined by “pit, church, nook store and grocery store”, We’re Not Going Again follows the progress of occasions – struggles for survival, battles with intransigent authorities, media misrepresentation – by the lives of three sisters (a sly look in direction of Anton Chekhov’s 1901 play).
Churchgoing Olive (Victoria Brazier) and livewire Mary (Stacey Sampson) are each miners’ wives; 18-year-old Isabel (Claire O’Connor) is courting a police cadet. Their tales are an amalgamation of fiction and of individuals’s reminiscences, shared with Pink Ladder theatre firm. Early on within the strike, Olive sits alone beside a brazier (represented by an upturned lampshade, repurposed from the opening scene, a deft, agitprop metaphor). “What are you doing?” asks Mary. “Minding the picket line,” replies Olive. “The place are the lads?” “Off holding a gathering to debate whether or not to permit girls on the picket!”
Over the months that observe, every part modifications; there can be no going again. The ladies transfer from home to public spheres: Isabel finds power to take sides; Olive organises with Ladies In opposition to Pit Closures and discovers the boundaries of the vicar’s Christian charity. Mary, pressured to discover a job, additionally finds a voice; speechifying, she sings, is “like speaking, solely loud”.
The songs (principally authentic and accompanied on keyboard by musical director Beccy Owen, who additionally performs a fourth character, Sue) are completely pitched, musically and dramatically, reprised by the unique solid underneath the course of Elvi Piper (taking up from 2014’s Rod Dixon). Concord is essential. Dissonant confrontations between the sisters by no means conclude in rupture. Whalley (author, lyricist and composer) makes use of music to indicate that therapeutic could be implicit in division: after Olive has delivered her eyewitness account of the Battle of Orgreave, the ladies’s voices softly intertwine at the same time as they defiantly sing: “that is warfare”.
We’re Not Going Again is touring to Sheffield (25 March), Hull (twenty sixth), Manchester (twenty seventh) and Leeds (28-Twenty ninth), with an additional efficiency in Ripon on 6 July
