ABOUT LEE HALL George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier wrote this about miners: “In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. All of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to their eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.” Orwell wrote from the perspective of an upper middle-class man. Lee Hall, playwright, is from a Newcastle, working-class background, and much of his work is about celebrating the complexities of what that means today. “The older I get, the more interested I am in exploring in the richness of working-class culture. It is a culture that is sophisticated, and as varied, as any other culture. In my Play The Pitmen Painters I wanted to show how, between the two world wars, that there was a great hunger for education and betterment. “ Lee grew up in a working-class, but not particularly political, family. His father was a self employed painter and decorator, while his mother was a housewife. “I was lucky that at my school I had scores of inspirational teachers , who had come through the 60s, and helped politicise me. They introduced me to poetry, drama and art. I am still friends with them today.” Newcastle has a history as an industrial and trade union heartland. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Lee was aware of this heritage, as well as of the politics going on around him. “It was only after University that I put everything together and I take the best of both worlds into my work.” He went to Cambridge University, a big jump for a young working-class man, where he encountered the upper class for the first time. “They didn’t have a clue about what ordinary people thought or did. In his work Lee has explored many issues relating to the lives of working-class people. “I write about the people I grew up with, my dad, other people’s dads and grandfathers. I think that they were sophisticated emotionally and intellectually, quite well read. Being hard blokes in rough manual jobs didn’t make them onedimensional.” In works such as Billy Elliot, The Pitmen Painters and now Close the Coalhouse Door he has told the history of the role that the miners, their union and their community has played in his country. And shown how we are impoverished by its destruction. “The Miners Strike in 1984-5 and the closure programme was an act of political and cultural vandalism in smashing up organised labour in a very deliberate way. What is happening now is from the seeds of 25 years ago.”
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