What? Go see a play about miners who paint? It’s not an over appealing prospect is it?

But if anything deserves to drag you away from the telly its Max Roberts’ wonderful production of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters.

The play was inspired by William Feaver’s book about The Ashington Group – a collection of real-life Geordie miners in the 1930s who discovered the joys of art and self-expressions which provided escape from their harsh humdrum lives.

It all began through the Workers Educational Association class which met in an old army hut where working miners could broaden their horizons when not hewing coal by hand hundreds of feet underground.

The Ashington Group began in 1934 and continued for 50 years. The work produced by its members are on exhibition at Woodhorn, where the pit in which the artists worked operated until 1981.

Set between that fateful first class and the eve of nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, The Pitmen Painters is a tremendous piece of work. It’s as fine a piece of ensemble acting you’re likely to see for some time.

The story, depicted in a series of short scenes acted out in an atmospheric multi-purpose set depicting the gloom and grime of the industrial North-East in its heyday, is funny, moving, inspiring and thought-provoking.

These are real people set in a time now long gone. But the hopes, fears, dreams and frustrations felt by them have not changed so much.

It’s a display of consummate acting taking the audience back to the time of depression, war and the perceived sunny uplands of post-war nationalisation.

Nicholas Lumley’s rule book-possessed union official, Joe Caffrey’s Somme veteran socialist idealist, Philip Correia’s sensitive, most artistic miner Oliver Kilburn, and Donald McBriode’s salt-of-the-earth Jimmy Floyd are a rumbustuous collection of equally fine performances.

Louis Hilyer is just fine as art teacher Robert Lyon – a college friend of Yorkshire’s artistic genius Henry Moore – who ditched his original idea of lecturing the WEA group on the great masters and instead encouraged them to express themselves though art.

Riley Jones takes two totally contrasting parts with conviction and the male cast is supplemented by Suzy Cooper as wealthy art collector Helen Sunderland, the local heiress who offered Oliver the chance to paint professionally and materially change his life.

Theatre publicity bills inevitable pick out the most favourable quotes. One for the Pitmen Painters is taken from a review which said is was ‘Masterly – Go and see It.’ I couldn’t put it better myself. You won’t be disappointed .

On until Saturday.