Theatre review: Odyssey 84

Molly Stubbs

Forty years ago today, yesterday, last month, and next year, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) were attempting to stop the closure of twenty pits with a general strike.

If they had succeeded, they would have ensured the employment of 20,000 men and preserved the very fabric, the seams if you will, by which their communities were stitched together.

Empathy

But Britain’s then-PM, Margaret Thatcher, wasn’t exactly famous for her capacity for empathy. The brutal way in which she dealt with the strike almost as soon as it began in March 1984 paved the way for Britain to import coal, rid the South Wales Valleys of all but a few pits, and even to the privatisation of rail and utilities.

Writer Tim Price (Nye, Protest Song, Doctor Who) followed these ripples back to their assumed epicentre and thus, the idea for Odyssey 84 began to germinate. Five years after it was green-lit, the press pack filed into the Sherman’s auditorium to watch his newest story, directed by Joe Murphy, brought to life.

Like Homer’s original epic, Odyssey 84 depicts loyalty, perseverance, and a journey home. We follow John O’Donnell (Rhodri Meilir), and his two best muckers Bill (Sion Pritchard) and Dai (Dean Rehman) as they begin to picket pits, at first blissfully unaware that they are no longer miners but soldiers in what will be an all-out war.

After travelling the country in search of support for their cause, the trio are tasked by the NUM to go to the continent and seek help there. All the while, their wives Penny (Sara Gregory) and Shaz (Lisa Zahra) lead their own emotional trek without ever leaving the village, diligently waiting for the journey’s end.

Melancholy

It sounds melancholy when put like that, but Odyssey 84 takes every opportunity to draw a laugh from its audience, to the extent that, were it not for its second act, the play could be classed a comedy. Here, Pritchard and Rehman shine as the sidekicks, with Matthew Bulgo as a variety of characters that all know exactly where the funny bone is. And I know I talk about Rhodri Meilir’s movement in all my reviews of his projects, but I swear I’m not just a fan of his bod. His physicality offers a humorous variety that perfectly complements his gruff, miner’s monotone.

Meilir is just one of the Odyssey 84 performers that, charmingly, don’t seem to realise just how funny they are. Many a follow-up line was lost to my ears in the laughter of my seat-mates. As Billy says, to evoke humour in the midst of what time would turn into a tragedy is perhaps ‘The Welshest thing I’ve ever heard’.

Brutalist backdrop John (Rhodri Meilir) and Penny (Sara Gregory) Photo: Mark DouetBrutalist

Another thing audience members will recognise is the brutalist-inspired backdrop. Every town in South Wales has a police station or multi-storey that resembles something from a Soviet five-year-plan. All concrete and straight lines to cast shadows over citizens, a brick-wall of industry made modern.

But, unlike those buildings so often deemed ugly, Odyssey 84’s set, designed by Carl Davies with lighting design by Rachel Mortimer, is an architectural marvel. Old-school street lights cast soft ochre glow over a pinging phone box, hidden neon strobes appear like a rainbow on a rainy day, ‘underground’ spaces are opened for coffins, fly systems bring down props from the heavens. It is the set that keeps on giving.

Speaking of props, many fall into the category pleasantly simple. Tables and boxes are continually repurposed to evoke characters’ homes, workplaces, workingmen’s clubs. Others appear for a single scene, but with their intricacy stick in the mind much longer.

At the recreation of The Battle of Orgreave that saw policemen injuring 123 NUM picketers, a terrifying horse lopes in a circle around our beaten miners, its rider in full riot gear, headlamp temporarily blinding the audience. In these moments of heightened tension, object and actor become symbiotic.

Satire

Like the comedies of the ancient Greeks, satire has a large part to play in Odyssey 84. It reaffirms that the events depicted, scabs receiving police escorts only to sit around all day in the pit’s canteen, unable to work without the other links in their chain, members of the LGBTQ+ community relying on the NUM to stick it to Thatcher, miners’ wives shoving illegally acquired ten-pound notes into toilet rolls for their neighbours, union representatives meeting Colonel Gadaffi, all took place in reality.

This dedication to recreating parts of its non-fictional basis betrays Odyssey 84’s point. As well as John O’Donnell, the play brings home a few hard but necessary truths about just how vital mines were to South Wales’ identity, and just how painful it’s been to heal the wounds of their disappearance. Does it overstep its mark at times, preaching that which could probably remain implicit? Yes, but that doesn’t detract from its impact.

Grim perspective

Most successful is O’Donnell’s evocative speech, the point of which is to preach, about the mines being the reason we exist. His declaration, “When they say they don’t want our coal no more, they are saying they don’t want us no more,” is an interpolation of the NUM slogan, “Close a Pit, Kill a Community”. Coupled with Matthew Bulgo’s poignant question “What are we without the pits?” Odyssey 84 puts the last forty years of life in the South Wales Valleys into grim perspective.

Although this speech, which drew an involuntary round of applause, crowns the first act, the true soul of Odyssey 84 is in its second. Unfortunately, this is also when the two-hour-forty-minute runtime starts to make itself evident. Even upon hearing a fellow theatre-goer through the toilet door say, ‘It’s almost three hours so we’d better have a wee,’ I didn’t twig to just how long that actually is.

Jokes

The play is by no means bloated, but in comparison to the snappy montages that feature the entire ensemble, expertly choreographed by Laura Meaton and Annie Duggan, and never-ending jokes in the first, the latter half’s drawn-out, dialogue-heavy scenes and fraught character relationships seem strikingly morose. It’s a struggle to come down from the high, but I suppose to be disjointed is quite the point.

It’s a symptom of narrative progression that second acts are when broken hearts are put back together. It’s also when the performers, particularly Gregory and Pritchard, really have a chance to shine. It may be the ‘slower’ of the two acts, but it contains Odyssey 84’s best scenes. It makes clear that this is not a history lesson. The play is an emotional exploration of two people thrust into the centre of an event that changed their lives as well as ours.

In 1937, a hundred years after Wales’ first deep pit, Abernant-Y-Groes Colliery, was sunk, George Orwell wrote, “Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about… Most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that [the miners] are doing it.”

Something of the same forgetting has taken place in the years since 1984. As more pits closed, were filled in, paved over, all trace of the tunnels beneath our feet made invisible by overground comforts, schools, cinemas, parks, Welsh mining became a relic.

Human side

Judging by the man in an NUM t-shirt I saw in the Sherman foyer, and the lone audience member who gave emphatic applause when the characters prevented François Pandolfo’s miner from scabbing, there are many out there who won’t need Odyssey 84 to show them the human side of what took place in those twelve months.

But for people like me, who’ve only ever been to mines on school trips, Odyssey 84’s bursts of Madonna, Bronski Beat, and New Order, selected by Ian Barnard, along with beautifully contemporary costumes make it unavoidable. Forty years is but a blip in human history. The battle you will see depicted in Odyssey 84 is ongoing, and the life you lead is stained in its bloodshed.

But, hey, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a superlative drag show thrown in for the price of admission.

Odyssey 84 is showing at Cardiff’s Sherman theatre until 26th October 2024. Visit the Sherman’s site for more information about the production and to purchase tickets.