In Time O' Strife

Although Graham McLaren strives intelligently to revive Joe Corrie's red flag-waving melodrama written both for and about striking Scottish miners, In Time o' Strife comes on like a perfect justification of my suspicions about Political theatre. Unsubtle, repetitive and predictable, it attempts to lend the struggle of the unions a tragic majesty, yet presents their defeat as inevitable and provides a middle-class audience with the perfect opportunity to purge those difficult emotions. 

McLaren's direction - and Imogen Knight's stompy choreography - go some way to rescuing Corrie's script from its weaknesses. Interspersing the routine loop of tragic incidents (mother's ill, the men want to give up, the boyfriend wants to be a scab, mother's ill, the men are determined, mother's dead, son's sent to prison, husband takes to drink, the boyfriend is a scab), McLaren's allusions to subsequent miners' strikes - the voice of Thatcher is as reliable as Vincent Price's voice for that authentic note of sinister horror - lend the tale a contemporary relevance. Knight's dance interludes convey the emotional tensions far more eloquently than Corrie's fake arguments, and the introduction of Corrie's poems cut to a more vigorous and immediate socialist anger.

The cast shakes a leg and the band beefs up the poems with rock arrangements - the savage The Common Man strays into punk rage, despite the polish of Jenny Reeve's vocal - and the final recitation of The International leaves no doubt as to the play's intentions. Yet it is clear from the first scene that the miners are going to lose: along with Corrie's atrocious characterisations (Jock is a worried about Bolshevik infiltration, then is suddenly shouting for a Soviet style revolution), dramatic tension and political rhetoric are drained of vitality. 

It is possible that McLaren's reworking of the script has left it so slight - he has adapted the script heavily and transferred the action from a house into a public bar - but his question in the programme 'if writers like Joe Corrie... had been encouraged... would Scottish theatre be different?' is left unanswered. Yet the trailer distils the ferocity of moments that suggest McLaren gave the production what fire it has.