Wonderland

Hampstead Theatre, London NW3

3/5

IT’S apt that on the 30th anniversary of the 1984 miners’ strike another new theatre production opens to explore the circumstances and context of the dispute.

Wonderland, written by miner’s daughter Beth Steele, seeks to do this by posing the lived experiences of miners against the machinations of government and their placemen in provoking the strike in order to break the NUM and destroy the mining industry in Britain.

In an ambitious staging, set designer Ashley Martin Davis transforms the theatre’s interior into the facsimile of an underground pit, replete with overhead gantries, winding gear, pit cage and subterranean galleries.

In dramatic terms, though, it is all rather inchoate. Opening with a group rendition of a traditional colliery song, we move to Milton Friedman extolling the virtues of free market capitalism and then segue to the induction of apprentice miners to life underground. 

This patterning persists throughout the piece. 

Sharp-suited politicians and executives conspire against the mining industry — cut to horny-handed sons of toil wrestling with testosterone-fuelled emotion, personal conflict and industrial tragedy and back again.

Quasi-didactally, we glean something of the background to and conduct of the strike but the piece never gets to the core of what was happening in the early 1980s and the government’s concerted attack on Britain’s manufacturing industries and organised labour.

Inevitably, there is discussion around whether there should have been a national ballot prior to calling the strike. In hindsight, that discussion is as redundant as the thousands of miners who have been consigned to the dole queues and smashing-up of their communities.

Ballot or no, Margaret Thatcher and her cronies were determined to wreak revenge on the miners and, more significantly, torpedo the trade union movement generally.

Successive Tory governments have continued this project unalleviated and, too frequently, were facilitated by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and new Labour.

Yet despite the dearth of analysis, Wonderland is worth seeing as a reminder of the facts of the strike and for the committed performances director Edward Hall draws from the actors. And the set is a marvel of construction.

Runs until July 26. Box office: (020) 7722-9301.

Dennis Poole