Wonderland

The set for the Hampstead Theatre production of Beth Steel’s second play, which takes place during the years of the 1980s miners’ strike, is truly transporting. The auditorium has been totally transformed, the floors replaced with iron grating, the audience seated on all sides of the performance space, a working lift installed.

Press night was postponed to accommodate the technical complexity of this set, designed by Ashley Martin Davis, and it’s undeniably impressive, taking its audience down into the pit, evoking the sweat, heat and dirt of life at the coalface. And yet, superbly realised at it is, there are times when the set works against Edward Hall’s production rather than with it. The moving parts – the lifts and hatches and platforms – begin to get in the way and, as a result, the play takes a while to find its feet. It is only in the second half that Steel’s ambitious account of the impact of the strike on a group of pitmen, shot through with song, begins to exert a grip.

While the play has clearly been carefully researched, it staggers a little under the weight of it all. When it focuses on the interplay between the miners, it is at its most successful. The large ensemble cast works well together at conveying the intense physical nature of the work these men do and the ties that bind them, but the politicians – with the exception of Thatcher’s eccentric adviser David Hart, played by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart – feel broadly drawn and the lack of any female voices feels like an odd omission.

Natasha Tripney