A play at the Fortune Theatre mines the experiences of an unlikely group of artists, reports Charmian Smith.
Whether you like it or not, good art will stretch your experience in some way, according to Patrick Davies.
He is directing Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, which opens soon at the Fortune Theatre, an unlikely but touching story of how art extended the experience of a group of miners.
The award-winning play opens on New York's Broadway at the same time as its New Zealand and Australian premiere in Dunedin as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts.
It tells the story of a group of 1930s Northumbrian miners who discovered art through a Workers Educational Association (WEA) course, started painting and became famous as the Ashington Group for their naive paintings about their daily lives both above and below ground.
"Apart from being a really lovely, human, funny, very touching story, what I love about it is it's true. The play is beautiful and you'll be touched by it. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by their experience," Davies says.
"The miners were just straightforward, everyday people in a wonderfully warm community, touched by loss and struggle. These guys had a vibrant social life, a very close-knit community, and it's reflected in their paintings."
Most of the men would have left school at 11 or 12 but, despite being at the bottom of a class-ridden society, they felt they had as much right to education and culture as anyone else.
They had studied Darwin and evolution through the WEA and hoped to do economics next, but, unable to find a tutor, settled for art appreciation, Davies says.
"They expect to sit down and learn stuff, but when [tutor Prof Robert Lyon] says art is an art, not a science, it's more about the feeling you get when you look at a painting, they find that anathema because they think good art must mean it ticks several boxes, which I think people still think today," Davies says.
He compares it to the public reaction to the teeth sculptures recently erected near Portsmouth Dr in Dunedin.
"I think the teeth are fantastic. Regardless of whether you love or hate them, so many people are discussing them. I think that's a primary function of art - to engender debate, to make people ask, so what is art?"
Prof Lyon encouraged the miners to do their own painting, which eventually attracted the attention of the art world for a short time.
Their paintings are now in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum at Ashington in Northumberland.
"They were painting for themselves. They never wanted fame but it just happened upon them and afterwards they continued without the idea of fame," Davies says.
They realised art is an expression of our humanity and daily existence.
"Most of these guys had never left Ashington. There's one moment in the play - and it's true - where they go to London to the Tate Gallery. It's as comparable as anyone doing their first OE. There's a lovely moment when they discover Van Gogh, who also painted miners early on in his career. The language in the play is so evocative and colourful.
"When you teach, you sometimes see a lovely moment when a young kid gets something and their eyes light up and you see something's happened inside to change them. A similar thing happened to the miners."
Too often, people walk into an art gallery and feel they've failed if they are not engaged by a work of art that is generally considered good, he says.
"When I saw the Mona Lisa I looked and looked and looked, then thought 'why are you trying so hard? You don't like it, do you. Walk away and see something else. There are so many other amazing things'."
Some people have no time for art because it doesn't impact on their daily life and think it's elite, but good art will stretch your experience in some way, Davies says.
"When you go to see something, sometimes it's going to thrill you and sometimes it's not. And if you don't get it, that's just as good a reaction. I think when you walk out of a theatre something has to have changed in you if the theatre's good. Even if you just walk out and go 'that was so much fun' and you feel lighter and happier and you've got a smile on your face from a really good comedy. The worst kind of theatre is when you don't talk about the play - then I think that act of theatre's failed miserably."
In Newcastle, where The Pitmen Painters first opened, after the show there would be heated discussions about art between lairds who had come down from Scotland and ex-miners, all of them with really strong opinions.
In 1930s England, ideas of class and people's place in society were predominant, but Marxist ideas were percolating through.
Intellectually, a paradigm shift was happening in people's understanding of the world and society, Davies says.
Before Einstein, the world seemed stable and absolute, but from the 1920s on there was a fundamental understanding in intellectual circles that nothing was absolute.
Social structures were beginning to break down and art was beginning to deconstruct itself.
If the world and reality were not absolute, our social systems didn't have to be, either.
There really was a fundamental change in the way people thought, Mr Davies says.
Catch it
The Pitmen Painters, by Lee Hall, inspired by a book by William Feaver and directed by Patrick Davies, opens at the Fortune Theatre on October 1 and continues until October 23, as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts.
A panel discussion at the Fortune following the October 12 performance will look at the question: "Do we really need art?".
