Chris Eldon Lee reviews “United We Stand”, which is at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn until Saturday 1st November 2014.
When the 3 members of the ‘Shrewsbury 24’ were given jail sentences in 1973, two of the jurors shouted out in court, “It’s a disgrace”.
That deep sense of injustice is undimmed four decades later – and Townsend Productions have harnessed the ever-present anger to produce a cracking piece of agit-prop theatre which is being presented nation-wide in parallel with a campaign to clear all 24 names.
It’s good, old-fashioned pub protest theatre of the kind that Joan Littlewood and Ewan McCall would have been proud of in the days of their Red Megaphone company; two blokes and a guitar making a powerful point. It’s a perfect style for the subject matter.
The show is completely biased of course, but writer/actor Neil Gore has done his research so well it all stacks up to leave little room for argument. The striking builders of North Wales (some working on the Wrexham by-pass) were jailed at Shrewsbury Crown Court for being Flying Pickets; for ‘conspiring to intimidate and cause affray”.
The alternative view is that it was Ted Heath’s Government and the National Federation of Building Trades Employers who were conspiring in order to smash the unions once and for all. Ask the miners if that doesn’t ring true to them.
Mr Gore and his co-performer William Fox make their stand in a most entertaining and imaginative way. The then Home Secretary Robert Carr is given a human ventriloquist’s dummy to manipulate. There’s a Sweeney-style police interrogation scene. And TV quizmaster Hughie Green asks a vacant old lady – hoping to win a food mixer – a string of questions that can only have one answer. Yes, nine successive Wrexham mayors did all belong to the same Construction Company family.
The music has been compiled under the guardianship of Shropshire folk legend John Kirkpatrick and swings from a re-lyriced “Hard Times of Old England”, through a pounding “I Was Framed” blues boogie woogie, to 70s glam rock icons The Sweet. The Strawbs “You Won’t Catch Me I’m Part Of The Union” had a full, sympathetic house singing along like good ‘uns.
But it’s when we hear the testimony of the accused that the room goes silent.
After the verdict, two of the builders, Des Warren and the now TV actor Ricky Tomlinson, risked even longer sentences by speaking from the dock. Neil Gore has recreated those impassioned protests from newspaper reports and they still have raw power. The doomed men point out that they are builders, not terrorists, and the only thing they are guilty of is being working class men wanting a guaranteed wage and decent health and safety conditions.
The campaign goes on, hampered by the fact that the Government won’t release the pertinent papers.
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