DVD/150: PRIDE (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

You know the film genre: individual / group take a stand against their fate, there are setbacks but triumph vindicates them: BILLY ELLIOTT, THE FULL MONTY, KINKY BOOTS, MADE IN DAGENHAM...

...and there's PRIDE, Matthew Warchus' marvellous film which tells the true story of how gay activists set up the support group 'Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners' during the 1984-85 miner's strike.

Stephen Beresford's excellent script mixes fact and fiction to tell how Mark Ashton and Mike Jackson started the group when they realized that the miners and their families were facing the same forces of oppression that they had experienced: the Government, the police and the press.

Brimming with wit and emotion, the film boasts memorable performances from Ben Schnetzer, Joe Gilgun, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Jessica Gunning, Faye Marsay, Paddy Considine, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, George MacKay, Menna Trussler and Lisa Palfrey

PRIDE is an instant classic...

Shelf or charity shop?  PRIDE never fails to make me blub: a testament to the times I lived through and to the remarkable Mark Ashton who died aged only 26 in 1987 from an AIDS-related illness.  Standing proud on the shelf.
 

THE FERRYMAN at the Gielgud Theatre - secrets in Troubles times...

2017 was already shaping up to be a great year for theatre and now Jez Butterworth's THE FERRYMAN has confirmed it.  Butterworth has already shown with JERUSALEM that he could write for a large cast but here that includes 21 speaking roles as well as a baby, a goose and a bunny!!

Despite it's roughly-agreed thirty year span, how many plays have directly addressed The Troubles in Northern Ireland?  Bearing in mind how deep it ran in both Ireland and the UK's collective psyche it cannot be said to have populated the main stages of the West End, the fringe maybe, cinema occasionally, the West End no. 

But Jez Butterworth has taken the queasy atmosphere in 1981 Northern Ireland and filtered it through a classic tragedy-style plot where the sins of the past come back to haunt those still living, both innocent and guilty.  But within that framework there is also a stunted love story, comedy, tension, poetry, swearing, 80s pop, the insidious nature of teenage peer-pressure and the constant undertow of nationalist resentment.

Dawn breaks as a couple are playing drunken what-if games in a cottage kitchen, they obviously have a special, easy relationship with each other but we soon find out, as the rest of the extended family wake up and enter the kitchen, that they are brother-in-law and sister-in-law and the oncoming harvest will change their relationship forever.

The very first scene sets a lingering discordant note: Father Horrigan is having a secret meeting with Muldoon, a man who exudes a chilly power.  A body has been discovered in a peat bog, hands tied, shot in the head.  The priest identifies him as a member of the Carney family.  The man's brother Quinn was once an IRA 'soldier' but renounced them at the time of his brother's disappearance to run his father's farm in the countryside with his wife, seven children and extended family.  Muldoon blackmails the priest to go to the farm and persuade Quinn not to make waves.

 

Quinn and his wife Mary had invited sister-in-law Caitlin to move into their home with her son Oisin ten years ago and has made herself indispensable to the family, with Mary retreating for longer periods to her bedroom claiming illness, Caitlin has assumed the role of homemaker.  She has never given up the hope that her husband is alive in England, having been fed with rumours of sightings.  

The rambling farmhouse is also home to aunts Maggie and Pat, uncle Patrick, and also Tom, a simple-minded Englishman who have lived with the family since being discovered as a child lost and disheveled.  Aunt Maggie has dementia but her lucid moments are shot through with a strange mysticism, Aunt Pat is a hardline Republican with a venal streak toward Caitlin who is wrestling with her deepening affection for Quinn who, in turn, is trying to hide his feelings for her now Mary is growing colder towards him.

All this is disrupted when Father Horrigan arrives with his painful news which sends Quinn and Caitlin into shock.  She tells Quinn that she will wait till the harvest has been collected before telling her son but Oisin overhears them and is plunged into despair.  The harvest is gathered, helped by their three young Corcoran cousins, but the celebrations are interrupted by the appearance of Muldoon, greeted as a hero by Aunt Pat and at arm's length by Quinn.  

Muldoon reveals his real interest in the Carney family, the news of the IRA hunger strikers dying has given them massive public sympathy and it would be counter-productive for Quinn or Caitlin to announce that the IRA murder their own.  The political and the personal erupt into a night of growing tensions and betrayals before an explosion of violence that will scar the family forever... 

Sam Mendes's production is a masterpiece of delayed tension; it's always there running under the action, you are just never sure when it will erupt - will it be the internal family pressure that explodes into violence or will it be external world that blows the family apart?  However it is both that leads the stage at the end to resemble a Jacobean tragedy.  I must admit the ultimate sudden bloodbath made me think of David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE which pulled my focus; the violence is necessary but I hoped it might be reached through the insidious emotional pressure of Aunt Pat and Mary.

But THE FERRYMAN is it's own entity and it's sheer breadth of invention and dramatic sweep belies it's rural farmhouse look - it also feels more of a whole than JERUSALEM which was powered by it's larger-than-life central character of 'Rooster', here Quinn is almost the still centre of the vortex with his family providing a non-stop array of vividness.  As Quinn, Paddy Considine is never less than watchable, his remarkable capacity for submerged hurt and anger is never far away, in this his stage debut.

Considine's slow-burn performance is all the more remarkable in that he is surrounded by actors playing to the back of the balcony - but in a good way!  Sam Mendes has assembled an excellent cast who all contribute much to the play's success.

It is a production that for once boasts four key female roles, all played wonderfully: Laura Donnelly gives a quietly luminous performance as Caitlin, trapped by circumstance in Quinn's family but unwilling to move on for her love of him; her final scenes of desperation ring shockingly true, willing to accept the most degrading of circumstances to save her beloved and his family.  Her scenes with Genevieve O'Reilly as Quinn's wife Mary were shot through with tension, a sisterly relationship which is undercut with feelings of bitter antagonism and jealousy.

This uneasy relationship is further undermined by the marvellously devious aunt Pat played with icy fury by Dearbhla Molloy, here looking like a dessicated husk of a woman.  Pat is the rural queen of the killer put-down and the laughs she easily wins from the audience tend to die on the lips when you realize how venal she is, yet she is given a believable history of devotion to the Cause through witnessing the death of her brother, killed defending the Post Office in Dublin during the Easter Rising.

Her counterpoint is Brid Brennan's aunt Maggie who for long stretches of the play simply stares from her chair in the kitchen but who wakes from her reveries occasionally to deliver truths learnt on her internal journeys in her mind.  It was marvellous to see these two exceptional Irish actresses given such fine roles to play.

Des McAleer is very good as the comical and understanding uncle Patrick with a fondness for Greek myths, while Stuart Graham is frightening as Muldoon, the softly-spoken IRA chief who understands the weaknesses within the Carney family all too well.  There is fine work too from John Hodgkinson as Tom Kettle, the simple-minded displaced Englishman who provokes a catalogue of disasters when he clumsily proposes to Caitlin hours after she learns she is a widow, and from the always dependable Gerard Horan as the blackmailed Father Horrigan.

At the start of the third act, Quinn's two sons have an early hours drink with their Corcoran cousins which turns more menacing as they show that they are ready to stumble into tragedy themselves.  The feeling of lives about to take a turn down the wrong road was expertly conveyed and in particular I liked the very believable filial performances of the Corcoran cousins: Séan Basil Crawford - as the oldest Shane, already in too deep with the IRA - Conor MacNeill and Oliver Finnegan.

The farmhouse was wonderfully evoked in Rob Howell's cluttered, lived-in set and Peter Mumford's excellent lighting illuminated the 24 hours that devastate the Carney family.

THE FERRYMAN has nagged away at me since I saw it and will for some time to come - I urge you to see this tender and terrifying tale of hidden love and hidden lies.  It's playing at the Gielgud Theatre until the 6th of January.

There Is Power In A Union

Every so often a film is made in the UK which takes you so unawares, so by surprise, that it refreshes your interest not just in British film but in the medium itself.

I booked to see a preview screening at the National Film Theatre of the new British film PRIDE directed by Matthew Warchus, I thought I would have a punt on it as it starred a number of actors that I like but as I took my seat I also suspected that it would probably be the sort of film whose poster would boast "This Year's Full Monty" and that it was "heartwarming".  In short I expected something that would easily fit all that is required of the average Sunday evening television series: lovable working class scallywags, strong but silent wives, comic character parts, brass bands playing every 5 seconds and a happy ending guaranteed.

The remarkable thing is that all those elements are there but when the film reaches it's emotional climax it is genuinely moving as it has been reached in such an honest and restrained way by director Warchus, writer Stephen Beresford and a remarkable cast.

What made the film so special is that finally here is a film that makes me think "Yes that's my history, that's the 1980s that I lived through".  The film has conjured up that time of covert Government pressure on anyone who didn't fit with their world - now doesn't that sound familiar?  Here is a film that could not be more timely. 

The film is worth it's weight in gold for many reasons but primarily for shining a spotlight on Mark Ashton who spearheaded the LGSM group.  When we staggered out of the screening, Owen wondered aloud how so little is known about Ashton, a genuine gay hero.  I guessed that it's a case of history is written by the victors - not only were the Miners beaten but ultimately so was the gay activism that Mark Ashton and his comrades stood for.  As he is pointedly told at the Gay Pride march that ends the film, "It's all about celebration now".

So Gay Pride becomes a glorified excuse for crap pop acts to peddle their product to the pink pound and activism can be ended as we now have taken over Old Compton Street.  Hurrah, we have created our own ghetto.

Stephen Beresford's excellent script introduces us into Ashton's world through a fictional character.  1984: Joe is a closeted gay student who escapes his suburban prison to come to London for the Gay Pride march where he meets the Out-and-Proud friends Mark, Mike, Gethin, Jonathan, Steph and Jeff.  He stays with them into the night at the Gay's The Word bookshop where Mark proposes that they form a new action group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

At first incredulous, the group is formed when Mark points out that the miners have the same enemies that they face: the government, the police and the media.  Soon they are raising large amounts of money but with nowhere to distribute it as their overtures are met with a refusal to accept their help.  A Welsh mining town is randomly picked and eventually they meet with Dai, a leader of the Strike committee in the Dulais valley who comes to London and accepts their passion to help.

A visit to Dai's village shows the group the depth of the struggle and both the activists and the miners find they have more than the perceived enemies to fight.  Behind all of this, the gay friends are having to deal with the growing shadow of AIDS.

Of course we all know the outcome of the strike but the coda to it was wonderful and as end titles told stories of the characters beyond the film's timeline it is impossible not to be uplifted, saddened and empowered.

Matthew Warchus guides the film with the touch of a master - only once, just before the end, does the pace seem unsteady - but otherwise he keeps a wonderful balance between the comedy and the drama while also finding small telling moments within the bigger picture - there is a wonderful cameo from Russell Tovey which is all the more telling for what is left unsaid.  Also memorable is a quiet scene between Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy where an absolutely killer punchline is not allowed to puncture the feeling of friendship, sadness, dependence and community.

Stephen Beresford's script also deserves kudos for giving the quite large group of characters little moments to shine and for giving them all the dignity they deserve - even the villains of the piece.

Warchus and Beresford are also gifted with a cast that give the feeling of a real ensemble with no one pulling focus despite the opportunities to do so.

Ben Schnetzer - unknown to me before this - has a naturalness on camera and is charismatic as Mark Ashton, driven to support the miners against all the trepidations of his comrades.  I loved Joseph Gilgun as Mike, Mark's close friend who is equally as driven to help but is more steady than his excitable friend.

Warchus seems to allow all his actors to find their own rhythms which pays dividends with Dominic West as Jonathan, the older member of the group, which starts off as the cynical seen-it-all participant but which through the course of the film, slowly becomes a rounded and multi-layered performance.  Andrew Scott as Gethin also gives a performance of subtlety and gentle strength.  His tiny scene of Gethin visiting his mother while he is in Wales is all the more emotional for being so restrained.

George MacKay has a gauche charm as Joe (aka Bromley by his new family) and I really liked the delightful performances of Faye Marsay as spiky Stephe as well as Karina Fernandez as Stella, itching to start her own breakaway group of Lesbians Against Pit Closures.

Wonderful performances by Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy and Paddy Considine give the film a solid foundation.  As the members of the Dulais Strike Committee who are most welcoming to the LGSM they each give impassioned performances representing aspects of a quiet, hardworking community victimised by the powers that be.

Paddy Considine gives a performance of subtlety and warmth as Dai, the head of the Strike Committee, who can see beyond prejudice to accept the help the gay community are offering.  Imelda Staunton is delightful as Hefina, the rigid moral backbone of the community who welcomes the activists into the village and, in possibly the film's best performance, Bill Nighy is excellent as the committee treasurer Cliff.  A taciturn man made anonymous by his own secrets, it's a joy to watch him be re-born through his association with the gays from London.  All Nighy's usual shtick is swept away as he gives a performance of lonely grace.

Jessica Gunning is excellent as Sian James, a young married housewife whose life is transformed by her experiences during the strike and through her relationship with the gay activists.  I also enjoyed Lisa Palfrey's performance of the bigoted Margaret who does all she can to wreck the association of the miners and the LGSM.

It would be easy enough to play the 'villain' but Palfrey keeps you intrigued in her character throughout. There is also excellent work from Monica Dolan as Joe's mother, as tightly controlled as her suburban decor.

Tat Radcliffe's cinematography and Simon Bowles' wonderful production design makes the 1980s real again and there is an invaluable contribution by Christopher Nightingale with a moving and eloquent score.  Nick Angel's music supervision also contributes to the excellent sonic recreation of 30 years ago.

We were lucky at the NFT for the film to be followed by a Q&A with producer David Livingstone as well as Schnetzer (and what a shock to discover he's American!), Marsay and Scott who were all insightful into working on the film and what they have gained personally from being involved in telling the story.

The following Sunday there was another preview screening at the Brixton Ritzy which we went to again as we were so excited by the film.  Far from being ready for all the film's power, again we were emotional wrecks at the end of it and I stayed for the length of the closing credits to recover - not that I succeeded as the credits roll over "To A Friend", The Communards' contemporary tribute to Mark Ashton.

I cannot urge you enough to rush to see PRIDE, it will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you think, it will make you proud.