Miners trapped for a week underground would, sure as hell, not show the humour, the sparring rivalry, the sheer energy of the seemingly doomed sextet presented by Chris Urch in his overrated 2013 play Land of Our Fathers.

Reduced to drinking their urine and contemplating the cannibalistic consumption of one of their number, they nonetheless gambol about the stage, spitting venom or spurting witticisms.

To show them as they would surely have been in real life – comatose and for the most part silent – would not, of course, have given us a play. Verisimilitude faltered, too, for me in the matter of designer Signe Beckmann’s set. Would a mine collapse result in an enclosing wall of such evenly shaped lumps of coal? Urch sets the play, directed by Paul Robinson, in May 1979 immediately following Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.

I suppose we are being implicitly invited to assess the mindset of a class of workers destined ultimately to be undone by her policies. They are a varied group whose different characteristics are shown in the fashion of such men-together dramas as, say, RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End.

Good-sort oldie Bomber (John Cording) is a prop for tyro miner Mostyn (Joshua Price). Their leader Chopper, a sometimes inaudible Cornelius Booth, shows steely fortitude but ends stripped and raving like Lear in the storm.

Brothers Curly (Tomos Eames) and Chewy (Taylor Jay-Davies) are neatly contrasted, with the former, rooted in the family mining tradition and resentful of the latter’s ambitions for a life elsewhere.

The one outsider, Polish ex-servicemen Hovis (Robert Jezek), is perhaps the best-drawn character, with moving reflections on the conflict in which so many of his fellow countrymen died.

3/5