Brassed Off – Leeds Playhouse

David Birrell and Stuart Naylor in Brassed Off at the Quarry Theatre, Leeds Playhouse. Picture: Kirsten McTernan

Brassed Off continues at the Quarry Theatre, Leeds Playhouse until 11 July 2026.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Pretty much like the film from which this production is adapted, Brassed Off emotionally leaves no prisoners. You won’t find here fine arguments about the balance between a damaging legacy of industrial pollution and the historic solidarity of British miners fighting for their survival. That of course was dealt a mortal blow – first through the miners’ defeat in 1984-5. Second by the rolling shutdown of the nation’s pits in the next decade.

Brassed Off goes all out for the human consequences. The severing of families, the impoverishment, the unfulfilled promises of new jobs. It’s Class War in technicolor.

Though Paul Allen’s adaptation is broadly faithful to Mark Herman’s screen version, director Amy Leach has added a sobering contemporary perspective – a  hooded youth in shades and draped in the flag of St George swaggering across the derelict pit head before dropping it contemptuously over the story to come.

What happened to that solidarity? Will the NEET generation pick up the torch of unity or hurl it through defenceless victims’ windows?

Brassed Off, through a superb rallying of wind instruments, blasts out just what the answer ought to be. In this instance incidentally the music of Grimley Colliery Band was provided by an amalgam of two real-life ensembles, the Horbury Victoria Brass Band and their near neighbours, Wakefield Metropolitan Brass Band.

Conflicted relationships are the heart of the story – whether it be struggling wives at loggerheads with husbands drawn irresistibly to band practice even though most fear the end of their band as well as their pit. Or whether it’s the initial wariness then outright hostility between the band and Gloria (Maddie Hansen) when it emerges she is conducting research for the mine management.

Gloria it transpires is an innocent being used to throw a cloak of credibility over the promise of a fair review for the pit’s future. She’s also a fine flugelhorn player, as she demonstrates with a lovely rendition of Rodrigo’s ‘En Aranjuez con tu amor’. Cue smitten young band member, Andy (Frazer Hadfield).

Ditto the sceptical remaining bandsmen. Glimpses of the their sexist attitudes pop up throughout the story even as some of the women remain the stubbornest fighters for the colliery.

Occasionally some of the dialogue feels like it’s been hewn out of coal rather than chiselled out of fine marble. But the production is not attempting a deep Ibsenian moral study. It’s here to rouse – and piece after piece of band favourites do just that. From the striding optimism of ‘March of the Cobblers’ to the poignant ‘Danny Boy’, the music drives the story to its defiant conclusion.

It would be tough to match the towering performance in the 1996 movie of Pete Postlethwaite as Danny the band leader, but David Birrell carves out a characterisation that guarantees his pivotal role as the bloody-minded champion of the Grimley band. His stirring closing speech about the potential of communities to unite rather than fracture brings an applauding audience to its feet.

There’s a touching performance too from Robin Morrissey, as the anguished Phil, torn between wanting to support his family but driven to buy a replacement for his collapsing trombone. His attempt to end it all is a reminder that in reality some miners did take their own lives.

Designer Katie Scott does a fine job in creating a set that captures the brooding, dust-shrouded pit head complete with winding wheels.

Mike Mckay