Theatre

The Shepherd Group Brass Band is York’s ‘premier league’ brass band. When they play The Floral Dance, the hairs stand up on your arms. The first-night audience at Brassed Off were still applauding the band’s opening number when conductor Danny (Ivan Chaplin) turned round and told them it was "crap". It so patently wasn’t that, everyone started laughing.

They did make a convincing stab at playing badly later on, when the fictional Grimley Colliery band gets plastered during the Saddleworth marching-band competition, but even that was awesomely orchestrated.

The cast of Brassed Off

"Music," says Danny, "is what you remember", and this is certainly true of York Stage Musicals’ confident and well-turned-in production.

Set ten years after the miners’ strike with the pit facing closure, the themes of redundancy and redemption are given an added emotional intensity by the score.

There is nothing to stir the heartstrings quite like a live brass band and key scenes – Phil’s (Stuart Rae) attempted suicide dressed as a clown, the ballot on the pit closure and, most poignantly of all, the bailiffs stripping Sandra and the kids of their possessions while the band plays at the national semi-finals – were all the more moving for their haunting musical counterpoints.

This is to take nothing away from the talented cast, among whom Luke Adamson as eight-and-a-half year-old narrator Shane (Phil’s eldest, a role much expanded from the film) held the stage like he was born to act. If he’s not on our screens in a couple of years time, I’ll want to know why.

Wise-cracking best mates Harry (Graham Bilton) and Jim (Martyn Hunter) and their better halves Rita (Juliet Waters) and Vera (Jeanette Hunter) up the comedy ante, although I was less convinced by Gloria (Abbi Wright) and Andy’s (Alex Papachristou) rekindled romance.

The play has a very poignant message.

The strongest characters took their cues very much from the film. This was reflected in the casting – Sandra (Jessica Hardcastle), Jim, Harry and Danny bore striking physical resemblances to those in the original – and in the performances (Chaplin had Pete Postlethwaite’s tics down to a fine art).

While Paul Allen’s play isn’t by any means a page-to-stage lift of Mark Herman’s film version, director Gilly Adam might have been better off going for an all-or-nothing approach. But then who takes on Tara Fitzgerald or Ewan McGregor and can hope to win?

The film has a touch of bathos that has always grated with me and the play’s ending is much better: touching, tremulous and yet never sentimental, it connects the colliery band’s past, present and future as a new dawn lights up the sky behind the unmoving pithead.

Kate Lock