Review: Mark Thomas: The Red Shed

The irony is not lost on Mark Thomas. Here he is, our foremost leftfield political comic, playing in the heartland of old, moneyed, manored Clifton. The usual intimate, packed Tobacco Factory Theatre it certainly isn’t, and there are even – gasp – quite a few empty seats in the Redgrave Theatre. The Red Shed, Wakefield, it most certainly is not either – but, via Thomas’s impassioned skills and stagecraft, that’s where we’re transported.

This show is both a homage to that place in the heartland of Yorkshire’s old destroyed mining community where Thomas first began performing live – and a galvanising call to arms for a fractured left in a time of increasing right-wing austerity.

The Red Shed, as Thomas tells us, is a Labour Club in Wakefield where, in the era of the Miner’s Strike, he was politicised during his time as a young drama student at nearby Bretton Hall. One of his most powerful memories of that time was witnessing the march back to work at the end of the strike – and of a group of schoolchildren, pressed up against school railings, singing in solidarity with their fathers, brothers and uncles.

The show is also a journey to prove that that incident with the children actually happened: and a paean to the importance of memory, stories and the oral tradition in keeping anger and rebellion and community cohesion alive in fighting injustice everywhere.

Along that journey – illuminated so vividly by his unique mixture of knowingly streetwise political polemic and craftily cunning theatricality – Thomas also tells us about his involvement in the fight to unionise fast-food outlets as the old industrial heart of areas such as Yorkshire have been replaced with zero-hour contracts and hopelessness… ‘You hear the victory yelp of globalisation every time you see a McDonalds on the site of an old closed coalmine’ as he so pointedly puts it.

Members of the audience are co-opted to help in the telling of the tale, donning masks of the faces of Red Shed stalwarts who helped Thomas search for the root of his memory. Yes the school existed, yes the children were there in the playground. Tales of comradeship, songs of unity (we join in a rehashed version of the Red Flag) revive the spirit of the Red Shed, and Thomas’s passion and spittle-flecked anger at the abandonment of the working class – laced through with potent and lacerating humour – roars through.

At its end, having dealt with the depressing Brexit ballot-box response by a disenfranchised class, there’s a painful half-minute’s silence after he recalls how one old woman’s overriding concern for the devastation of her area was the demise of the Pound Shops.

It’s pure political theatre, but as real and as red in tooth and claw as the red door props of the Red Shed on the stage. Laughter and tears are never far apart…

Mark Thomas performed The Red Shed at the Redgrave Theatre on Tuesday, Sept 20 and Wednesday, Sept 21. For upcoming comedy listings, visit b247.staging.proword.press/channel/whats-on/comedy