BRIGHTON is hardly coal-mining country but dance-cum-theatre sensation Coal makes you feel like you were back in the tumultuous era in which miners were at threat like never before.

Gary Clarke brings together raw and powerful choreography with comedic interludes, audience participation and plenty of varied music to offer a beautiful representation of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

This show never has a dull moment and leaves the viewer with a gentle sense of reflection. Clarke has said that he wants “to capture a time in British history that seems to be being forgotten” and thus the politics of the age are in there, embedded in the very nature of the production.

The narrative arc of the performance takes us with the men from the early morning, with wives cooking and making tea before they wake up, to the oppressive conditions of the pit (beautifully rendered with smoke effects), to the picket line and an encounter with Margaret Thatcher.

The story makes room for and celebrates the often overlooked mining community women; a particularly subtle homage to their unpaid labour shows them scrubbing their men when they emerge from the mine.

Later, they join Women Against Pit Closures and, in a particularly comedic turn, offer the audience biscuits while organising a raffle to raise money for the strike fund.

Coal carries the weight of experience as many of the women performing had lived through the strike.

A highlight was the appearance of a blue-suited Thatcher on stage. The miners and wives gathered behind her, one man carrying a megaphone, in a symbol of powerful resistance. This is a performance which celebrates that power, but it is all the more valuable in that it does not just show the picket line.

It uses dance to show emotion and build a narrative which hints at the meaning of solidarity within mining communities before the strike started.

Freya Marshall Payne