I’m less than a month into my post as Artistic Director of Red Ladder and yet working alongside a small team who achieve the seemingly impossible each week, and the excitement of bringing back a show which is already proving a huge draw to audiences, is powering me through the days.

‘We’re Not Going Back’ opens in Sheffield next month to mark the 40^th anniversary of the miners’ strike, and is exactly why I wanted to be part of this company. It’s funny, it’s warm, and the characters are people we know – family.  Three sisters who become part of the strike, joining the pickets and organising everything from fundraising to packed lunches: leaders, not just supporters. And all while bickering, laughing, and fighting: for their families, their neighbourhoods, their towns, for the lives they knew. A fight that would change everything.

It reminded me of when I saw the film Matewan, by John Sayles, only a few years after the miners’ strike ended but over three and a half thousand miles away.  I was staying with my grandmother in Washington, DC,  and came back from the movie talking about the Pinkertons [mercenaries, armed and hired in] strikebreaking and killing miners during the West Virginia Coal Wars of the 1920s.  Then my grandmother said, “Yeah, I remember when the Pinkertons came to Gary [West Virginia, where my mother grew up],” and I was gobsmacked. I sat and listened, and listened, and listened. They’d lived through the kind of battles I’d just seen on screen. And I had never known, until that moment, what they had to do to make a life worth living for my brothers and sisters and cousins. And me. And I hadn’t realised that my Uncle Francis [Francis Lewis Martin – pictured above] was the first African-American on the United Mine Workers of America’s International Executive Board. I hadn’t realised that his brother, my Uncle Junior [Napoleon Bonaparte Martin Jr], had been on the grievance committee of his local UMWA branch since 1963 – the year of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech – and then local president.

Last week, I met one of the cast from ‘We’re Not Going Back’, Victoria Brazier, in her real-life union organising role, pinch-hitting for a Yorkshire colleague at the Sheffield branch of performance industry union Equity. Executive Producer Chris Lloyd and I talked about Red Ladder’s earliest days – born from demos back in 1968 – and how activism is still at the heart of our work, partnering with Unite the Union for this upcoming tour.

That film, Matewan, unlocked sixty-year-old memories in my family of how they fought for their part of the Appalachians, memories to put fire in our bellies while fighting Reagan’s anti-union crusade.  This play, We’re Not Going Back, reaches forty years to find the camaraderie and love and belief we need to power us through this age when some people are losing their belief in grassroots politics and the strength that comes from fighting together for what matters most:  family, community, a future.

As Mary from We’re Not Going Back says,

“And once you’ve got over the fear of getting up, then the words are queuing up to get out and you’re saying good things, important things, words so full of meaning much. And then the words get louder, and the spaces get bigger – and everyone in the room is holding your hand and willing you on, you’re part of something, a band, a community, a movement. And it’s a glorious thing.”

Book your tickets now for the upcoming tour of ‘We’re Not Going Back’