About Brassed Off

Brassed Off started life as a smash hit movie, written and directed by Mark Herman, starring (Academy award nominated) Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor, the movie picking up a brace of minor awards.

Playwright Paul Allen was then commissioned to turn this movie into a play, which, in a art imitating life moment, was to debut at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre in 1998, the very same venue at which young Shane aspires to be snooker world champion. It is perhaps ironic that Sheffield might be considered the heart, if (perhaps more argumentatively) not the capital of Yorkshire, the home county of Grimley, the fictional village where Brassed Off is set.

This play is a story not only of events, but of people, and the way that people and families are affected by events. Whereas the film portrays these events directly, the play looks back a few years at these events as remembered by Shane, who, in 1994, was all of eight years old.

Shane is the son of Phil who is in turn the son of Danny, and the three generations of the Ormondroyd family form the nucleus of this play.

Theres something of a tradition of mining communities having brass bands, and back in the days when there were many successful mining communities in the UK there were, of course, many brass bands. Some of them even became famous outside of their communities, prior to the movie perhaps the best known being the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, who had a surprise pop hit in 1997 with "Floral Dance" reaching number two in the UK charts. All that changed when Brassed Off hit the screens, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band were suddenly on the map.

The names Grimethorpe (real) and Grimley (ficticious) are surprisingly similar, and its fair to say that the backstory of the Grimley Colliery Band is the story of the real thing.

There could be no better story than that on the Grimethorpe Colliery Band's History Page:

In 1992, shock waves reverberated around the mining community in Great Britain when the government announced its programme of pit closures. It soon became apparent that Grimethorpe was on the list of mines to be shut. Even as recently as 1992, 17 members of the band were employed at Grimethorpe Colliery. All these players were soon made redundant, and the future looked bleak. The pit closures were announced just 5 days before the band were due to contest the National Brass Band Championships at the Royal Albert Hall, London. Needless to say, the pressure was immense, the world's media seized on the band as a 'new angle' for their stories...... SNIP!

Can't give the entire story away!

But importantly, Brassed Off is more than a backstory of pit closures, its about the life and times of a community, and how the stresses on the community shape the lives of the people in that community.

Come join us as Shane guides us through what is really part of his upbringing, his family, their mates, their families, the picketing wives, and of course, the love story, a tale of unfulfilled young love, in a twist on the across the tracks theme...