When Beth Steel sent her play Wonderland to theatres for their consideration, one of them inquired whether she had seen Billy Elliot. Wonderland begins in 1983 just before the start of the miners' strike, but it was as if the theatre thought Lee Hall and Elton John's terrific musical was the last word on the matter. Still, at least that theatre read it. Most didn't.
Apart from 'solidarity' and 'once we were kings' BETM is politically light compared to Wonderland concluding at the Hampstead Theatre London this week. The audience is sat in the round circling a pitshaft leading to a coalface. Act 1 of this play by Beth Steel is set in a Nottinghamshire mine as two young lads Malcolm and Jimmy face up to life as apprentice pitmen. it is all very realistic. The dust, the dynamite coal face explosions and the miners songs. The grit is all there. Interspersed (as if commentating to us) are those 'above' who become closely involved in breaking the subsequent strike when rule 41 brings the miners out WITHOUT a ballot :Milton Friedman the economist,Ian Macgregor the chairman of the National Coal Board, Peter Walker and Nicholas Ridley the respective Energy and Transport secretaries in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Being set in Nottinghamshire we see also rogue miners being wooed by the politicians to set up an alternative more maleable trade union; 'The Democratic Union of Miners'. Act 2 is devoted to the harsh realities of being on strike. The two sides clash and as in Billy overtime cash is waved by the police and the use of riot shields and beatings by truncheons is ten times more vivid. The other clashes are of course the returning scabs and those who remain on strike and the animosity between the two. We see also the strikers fighting for their livelihoods and families amid abject poverty. Surrounding all this is an Administration hell bent on it's vision for a trade union emasculated Britain. The drama unfolds brilliantly culminating in the pitched battle of Orgreave Colliery and the return to work of the miners with nothing to show for a year on strike. The play concludes with the death of a miner when a coalface explosion goes hideously wrong. Interwoven into the narrative are two other events from 1984 with passing reference made to; the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London and the IRA bomb at the Grand Hotel Brighton aimed at wiping out Mrs Thatcher and her government. I found Wonderland a deeply moving play. We never saw Arthur Scargill or Maggie but her words 'the rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob' were all pervasive. Wonderland was a very raw experience for me and it was very clear by those in tears in the audience (including me) that we were all very moved and deeply troubled in equal measure by what we had witnessed.
