Season 23 Play 2 – Close The Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater
Directed by
Cast
Thomas Milburn – Leslie Clark
The Expert – David Hersee
Mary Ann Milburn – Rita Scully
Vicar – Robert Shaw
Jackie – Kenneth Hemsley
Geordie – Donald Clough
John Milburn – John Goldsborough
Frank Milburn – David Sinfield
Ruth – Mary Woolridge
Singing Pitwoman – Brenda Stott
A Guest – Keith Short
Synopsis
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Directors Notes
In any list of the ten best one act plays it would be almost impossible to exclude “The Price of Coal” by Harold Brighouse. I met it first as a schoolboy and cannot forget the shiver that ran through me as I read the closing lines of the play. The shiver came again nearly twenty years later in the middle of the last war, when I saw the most memorable cartoon showing a half drowned sailor clinging to a life raft in a sea covered with oil from a blazing tanker; the caption read, “The price of petrol went up today by a halfpenny.”
Times, the dramatist’s tactics, audiences have all changed ; central heating and electric storage heaters mean that many of us rarely see a coal fire, and out of sight is too often out of mind.
One of the things Close the Coalhouse Door does is to remind us of the price of coal.
