If you lived our lives, you’d be the same. In your hearts too would burn such a flame.
1984 musical based on Melvyn Bragg’s novel of the same name about a Cumbrian farming family, which in turn was loosely based on his own family history.
The show follows John Tallantire, a farm labourer and later coal miner, and his wife, Emily. The first act takes place when they are first married, and the second several years later when they have two teenage children, May and Harry.
Provides examples of:
- Actor-Muso Show: The trailer for the 2019 Queen's Theatre Hornchurch
production shows a backing band with a piano and guitar immediately behind the main turntable stage, but most of the other instruments appear to have been played by the cast. - Book Ends: The show starts and ends with John attending a hiring fair.
- Grief Song: "Day Follows Day" is about life carrying on even as the community carries the grief of the losses they suffered as a result of the First World War.
- Dark Reprise: The melody from "You Never See the Sun", a song about May's excitement about living in the countryside and her burgeoning curiosity about sex, comes back later in the show as the farewell song the cast sings when John and Isaac, as well as many of the other men in the community, go off to fight.
- Oop North: The musical takes place in Thurston, a fictionalised version of Melvyn Bragg’s hometown of Wigton in Cumbria.
- Job Song: "Work" is about the exploitation of the hired men by the landowning farmers.
- Reprise Medley: The show ends with a reprise of “Song of the Hired Men” which goes on to incorporate several other songs from the show.
- War Is Hell: "War" details the gruesome horror of trench warfare.
