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The Pitmen Painters asks - as Hall did in Billy Elliot - why the arts seem to belong to a privileged cabal. What makes others - that's to say, most of the population - feel excluded? I hope the Culture Secretaiy has booked a ticket, because the question - the main point he should be tackling -will probably never again be put so buoyantly, in a play that's both deliciously comic and grave. Seventy years ago, in an old army hut in Ashington, Northumberland, a group of miners met to talk about art. Most of them had started down the pit when they were 12; none of them had been inside an art gallery; they wanted their visiting university lecturer to explain the secret of a remote world. He did better than that: he got them painting and put that world into their hands. They painted ponies hauling coal, women pumping water for washday, men showing off whippets. 'We made our life into art,' one of them says. 'It don't get better than that.' Their work was exhibited in Durham, in London, and later in China; they were for a time celebrated. But who now has heard of them? The Pitmen Painters, based on William Feaver's book, is a terrific piece of historical retrieval, a fine piece of art criticism and a stirring political rebuke. Above all it's an immediate, gripping, searching work of art. It doesn't require a code-cracker to make it out: clarity doesn't make it less penetrating, just more lovable. Max Roberts' production strongly conjures up the period - from 1934 to the nation-alisation of the mines in 1947 -without romanticising it. Gary McCann's utility design - austere lighting, fold-up wooden chairs -makes reproductions of the paintings the focus of the action. The assiduous, acerbic miners, suited, pullovered and impressive, don't have the mix-and-match look often seen in TV period drama. Nor do their personalities. The group were taken up by honourers of working-class culture such as Mass Observation. The lecturer who made his reputation by encouraging his students waxes lyrical, saying their work proves everyone is creative. He's taken to task by one of the miners, who's interested in being assessed for merit rather than effort. You wouldn't, he points out, say that a roomful of paintings by rich people proved that rich people could be creative. And anyway, he goes on, it's not true that everyone can do it: 'Our lass can't paint.' - Susannah Clapp, Observer
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