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Towards the end of Martin Green’s brass-infused play for the National Theatre of Scotland, there is a resonant metaphor. It makes the connection between directing the breath to play a wind instrument and dealing with life’s stresses.
“The skill is in controlling that pressure,” says Keli, a 17-year-old tenor horn player who knows all about pressure. On her plate is a thankless job in a supermarket, a mentally ill mother and a solo spot in a national brass band competition.
Making an impressive professional debut, Liberty Black is vigorous and tough in the lead role, a young woman so used to having her defences up, she cannot see when she is being helped – not least by band leader Brian (an avuncular Phil McKee). All she knows is that music gives her order.
Keli is a young woman rooted in the landscape. Hers is a village shaped by its industrial heritage, traumatised by the miners’ strike and muddling on by in a resolutely modern world. Although Alisa Kalyanova’s set cannot decide whether to be literal or impressionistic, its cavernous black walls never let us forget this is a community built on coal.
Community is behind another of Green’s metaphors, one that resonates less than it should. Falling into a collapsed coalmine, Keli meets the long-dead Willie Knox (a sonorous Billy Mack), famed not only for his prize-winning tenor horn playing, but also for heroically surviving a mining accident. An old-school socialist, he is thinking of both music and industry when he eulogises the “combined efforts of determined souls”.
It is a powerful sentiment, but in focusing so tightly on one woman’s story, the play is less about the communal than the individual. Only when, magnificently, the Whitburn Band (alternating with Kingdom Brass) takes to the stage at the end of Bryony Shanahan’s production do we get a sense of collective endeavour.
