Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and The Pitman Painters, has given a creakily structured play a makeover, with Samuel West directing. Mr West is more your classic Islingtonian than a gritty Northerner acquainted with the coalfields. To his credit, he gets this quibble out of the way at the start, with a parody of Brechtian didactic theatre (enhanced because a cast accident meant that Mr West, who starred in Enron, had to kick off the run at the Northern Stage in Newcastle, understudying the role of the "expert", in his Open University roll-neck). 

A pithy account of British industrial decline follows but fear not, it's not all hard labour (or Old Labour). Glasgow's songs are rendered with real charm and Hall relishes a one-liner. A character explains that the mines were replaced by "a crisp factory, a car factory — and a perfume factory. That would be the olefactory." But it's a thin seam indeed, trying to make a work of this era reflect political realities today. Plater once ruminated on the "strange lost land" of obsolescent dramas and this one works better dealing with the grievous unfairness of the mining past than as a parable for present political action. 

A heavy hand is applied to the beefed-up part of the feminist girlfriend (Louisa Farrant), who brings an alien "ism" into the socialist household and ignites fraternal strife by flirting with her boyfriend's embittered proletarian brother John (Nicholas Woodley). Hall's strength is depicting tormented working-class masculinity, so both Farrant  and Jane Holdman as Mary, the household matriarch, sound a bit like ciphers. 

We're dispatched with a boilerplate sermon about the evils of capitalist greed, plus the vague hope of the triumph of an unspecified kindly socialism. That and Newcastle United winning ten European championships: both equally likely.