Melvyn Bragg Howard Goodall

A Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch and Hull Truck Theatre production in association with Oldham Coliseum Theatre BOOK BY MELVYN BRAGG MUSIC AND LYRICS BY HOWARD GOODALL A SERIOUS MUSICAL ABOUT ORDINARY PEOPLE HOW A YOUNG COMPOSER AND A TV PRODUCER CREATED The Hired Man first night after-show party, AN ENTIRELY NEW SOUND FOR BRITISH MUSICALS November 1984 (l-r Andrew Lloyd Webber, Howard Goodall and Melvyn Bragg) Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock y the time The Hired Man closed in the “He was as thoughtful, talented and sensitive chorales, duets and ensemble numbers, the score Salisbury in 2004 - for which Goodall wrote a new West End in 1985, after five months, it had as any of those who wore fine clothes and sounds like the musical love child of Tallis and song, ‘Day Follows Day’ - to a nationwide tour by already inspired great devotion among its dominated fiction,” Bragg said in an interview Vaughan Williams - with Goodall’s acute ear for New Perspectives in 2008 that journeyed as far as Bfans. Many remember it as the greatest at the time. “Naively, I thought the novel could beautiful melody lines laid on top. New York. British musical of the last half century, and ‘show them’.” audiences are struck by its epic scope and serious Goodall nervously played some songs to Bragg in The next few years saw revivals in Bolton, tone - especially since it predated Les Misérables That was exactly the same impulse that fired a vast empty ballroom at the Edinburgh Festival. Colchester, Leicester and London, cementing the by two years. Howard Goodall to adapt the book in musical form. Bragg loved them, and so the show eventually show’s reputation as one of the country’s best He wanted to avoid the “superficial, artificial, unreal” came together. and most beloved home-grown musicals. In 2012 Melvyn Bragg had written the first part of his quality of so many other shows and to create “a The Hired Man had a homecoming of sorts, with Cumbrian Trilogy - an epic tale of love and loss, serious musical about ordinary people…, who are Anxious about putting The Hired Man straight into a run at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on- community and survival, hardship and pleasure - poor and whose lives have real ups and downs”. the West End, the duo decided to try it out first at Windermere, just a few miles down the road from more than 20 years earlier. He wanted to fill his Together, they created something that, today, is the Southampton Nuffield, which had a reputation where it’s set in Bragg’s home county of Cumbria. novel with ordinary, working people, recreating seen as a keystone in British musical theatre. for strong new work, and then in Leicester. Finally, the world of his grandfather: born into a family of on 31 October 1984, The Hired Man opened at the He and Goodall have remained deeply attached 16, a farm labourer at 14, a coal miner, a soldier in In 1983, Bragg was well known as the presenter Astoria in London. It set a new idiom for British to the show, too. Bragg played the role of the the First World War. of The South Bank Show, as head of arts musicals, completely unlike the pop and rock- narrator in a concert version in 2016, while programmes for LWT and as an acclaimed influenced Andrew Lloyd Webber megahits such Goodall attends most of the revivals, even amateur novelist. He even had a West End musical already as Starlight Express (which had opened just a few ones, or sends letters of goodwill like this to a high under his belt, Mardi Gras (1976). months earlier in the West End). school in America in 2014: Goodall was excited to write his first musical. Barely Ironically, while The Hired Man deliberately “If you had told me that this show, rather unusual in his 20s, he was already a successful composer, avoided the high concepts, lavish sets and big for the time, would one day be performed in a with music for Rowan Atkinson’s fringe shows and solo numbers of the Lloyd Webber world, it was high school in Westchester, New York, by young the theme tune for Not the Nine O’Clock News on he who produced the show’s West End run. After people as yet unborn I would have laughed in his CV. After these initial successes, Goodall’s agent he pulled out as producer, and despite efforts by disbelief. And yet this is where we are today, by suggested he change direction and write a musical, Bragg to save it with his own money, the show some strange and delightful miracle.” “but he was surprised,” Goodall recalled in 1993, closed after 164 performances at the Astoria. A “when instead of the glitzy money-spinner he had few days later, it won a prestigious Novello Award Nothing existed before that was quite like it, envisaged I came up with a musical based on a for the year’s Best Musical. and nothing really since. And so, sparked by the Melvyn Bragg novel”. humble life of a farmhand in Cumbria more than a Four years later, it made the journey to America, to century ago, The Hired Man is sure to remain one As Bragg remembers it: “This bloody stick-insect an off-Broadway theatre, where a glowing review of the most important markers in the history of came to me and said, ‘I want to do a musical from The New York Times kept it afloat for a few musical theatre in this country. and I want you to write it.’” Goodall wanted it to weeks despite its strongly British subject matter sound unlike any other musical. At the heart of and musical style. Tim Bano © John Good it there was to be choral music blended with an inheritance of the English folk tradition. From the And what about Bragg and Goodall’s creation all The Hired Man original West End production at the Astoria Theatre, 1984 ever-flowing piano line, as restless and pastoral those years ago? Well, it’s been regularly revived Conrad Blakemore/ArenaPAL as a Cumbrian brook, to the mixture of anthemic across the country, from a major version in CUMBRIA IS THE OLD REGIONAL NAME FOR THAT PART OUT OF THE OF NORTH-WEST ENGLAND WHICH INCLUDES THE HIGHLAND HEART OF THE LAKE DISTRICT AND ALSO THE SURROUNDING LOWLANDS WHICH BORDER THE SOLWAY FIRTH AND MORECAMBE BAY, AS WELL AS THE EDEN ROCK VALLEY AND THE CROSS FELL ESCARPMENT. ost of those who have lived here for As Melvyn Bragg himself observed in his 1983 the past 7000 years have been farmers, book, Land of the Lakes: despite the poor quality of the land “The miners and their descendants, then as now, Mitself. Although a few farmers were kept hound dogs and whippets, fished, shot, lucky enough to have rich soil passed down in the climbed, walked, went back into the place from family or to otherwise acquire such an advantage, which their families had stemmed.” for the great majority their working lives were spent on the fells, which need careful tending to Where he begins his drama is in the thick of these provide even decent grazing land. complementary lifestyles, at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. The 1880s had seen a shift Perhaps less well-known outside Cumbria is the in policy in the miners’ unions. For many years, long history of mining in the area. Celtic tribes dug their wages had been tied to the price of coal but, there for copper, and the Romans were aware of when it fell heavily, the result was disastrous. In copper, lead, zinc, iron and silver deposits. Unlike 1888, a Yorkshire miner rallied unions in several the land, the mineral deposits were of high quality counties and achieved an amazing 10 per cent and, by the end of the 16th century, German miners wage increase, and this led to the foundation were well established at Keswick. And coal, too, of the Miners Federation of Great Britain the was found here - on the western edge of the Lakes following year. Twenty years later, in 1908, they ran rich seams, often running far out under the sea. finally got a statutory eight-hour working day, but it took another four years, and a strike which The opportunities for exporting this natural asset involved a million men, to get legislation assuring turned Whitehaven from a small fishing hamlet a minimum wage on the statute book in 1912. into the earliest post-medieval planned town in England and, at one time, it was ranked the third In 1908, too, the Liberal government - against most important port in Britain, after London bitter Tory opposition - introduced the Old and Liverpool. Age Pensions Act. The state was beginning to take responsibility for the welfare of its ordinary Although there were some immigrant workers people - a responsibility which had previously - from Ireland, and Cornishmen from the been carried by such organisations as the Friendly worked-out tin mines - most of the miners came Societies, voluntary workers’ cooperatives to from Cumbria’s own hinterland, from the hills which people paid a few pence a week to guard and farming communities. Norman Nicholson against sickness, accident or destitution. The described the strong connections between the introduction of the pension was literally a new two in his Portrait of the Lakes in 1972: lease of life for most of Britain’s population: in “For the furnaces used to smelt Lake District ore 1904, out of a population of about 44 million, a with Lake District limestone, and the town itself is mere 1.25 million were seriously wealthy, another built of Lake District slate and Lake District flags.

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