At the outset, the two worlds clash to droll effect. Both sides deploy language as a weapon — the pitmen use the defensiveness of Geordie deadpan responses to discomfit their teacher. Hall's vernacular rarely falters: when Robert raves about his group's first efforts at painting as "untutored art", one of the men replies that this must be his fault, since he's been tutoring them. 

Naive questions about what art is expose the tensions around abstraction, representation and value. The famously outsize Bedlington terrier painted by one of the group is drawn so dominantly, its creator says, because he made the dog too big by accident. A crouching miner in a seam has a shoulder that "looks like a horse's leg". The jovial patter about artistic frailties conceals the small miracle of a group of uneducated men producing work of quality which bridged gaps of wealth and circumstance.

Herein lies the problem of the play in its second half. Hall is so keen to lard the tale with a political significance that the thin seam cracks. 

Oliver Kilbourn (Trevor Fox) is a large lummox of a man — angular, uncomfortable and supremely gifted. He attracts the attention of a braying bohemian, Helen Sutherland (Joy Brook), who wants to save him from the mines and offers him full-time work as a painter. Oliver rejects the offer, only to regret it. The performance is heart-rending but somehow misdecisions always appear to be the fault of the patrons, not the painters.