Keli, Edinburgh review: 'magnificent'

Keli, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★

Ten days, and two new shows about the scars left by Scotland’s mighty coal industry, and its bitter end in the miners’ strike that was called off 40 years ago this spring.

The first was Sylvia Dow’s Blinded By The Light, premiered in Bo’ness last week; and now, here comes the National Theatre of Scotland’s Keli, a bigger and even more theatrically ambitious exploration of very similar themes, built around the brass band music that was such a vital part of mining communities’ lives, and written and composed by Martin Green of the acclaimed Scottish-English band Lau, whose company Lepus co-produces the show.

Liberty Black and Phil McKee in Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic

Like Blinded By The Light, Keli sets up an interaction between a younger generation living with the aftermath of coal, and those involved in the industry decades ago; but whereas Dow places her two time frames in parallel, Keli goes boldly for the more surreal option of bringing past and future face to face.

Its heroine, Keli, is a fierce 17-year old girl growing up in a former mining town half-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her language is ear-poppingly obscene, and her life desperately stressful, with her mother suffering a long-term mental breakdown that makes it almost impossible for Keli to juggle her home commitments with both college and her rubbish part-time shop job.

Keli, though, also has a gift. She is a brilliant horn player, the best her local brass band - a long-term survivor of the mining era - has ever seen; and her life reaches crisis point when she is chosen to play a supremely difficult horn solo at a major UK competition in the Albert Hall. It’s on her return from this traumatic trip to London that, through a bruising chain of events, she suddenly finds herself underground, talking to a 20th century man who should be dead, but whose life as an acclaimed horn player in the band both mirrors and contrasts with her own.

Liberty Black as Keli and Billy Mack as William in the theatrically ambitious Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic

All of this is handled in brave and spectacular style in Green’s play, many years in development, and based on what was once a lockdown audio drama. The story has a flashback structure which places Keli’s conversation with the man from the past, one William Knox, front and centre; while the events and stresses that lead to their encounter emerge from the darkness around them, on Alisa Kalyanova’s powerful underground cavern of a set.

Martin Green’s music, directed on stage by Louis Abbott, is quite extraordinary, sometimes played live on stage by brass musicians Andrew McMillan and Hannah Mbuya with support from the cast, sometimes involving a full and glorious brass band (either Whitburn Youth Band or Kingdom Brass), and sometimes integrated into George Dennis’s powerful sound design; but always combining the familiar harmonies and strains of brass band music with passages where those sounds refract and shatter, spinning off into aural images of chaos and breakdown.

Director Bryony Shanahan orchestrates all these elements to perfection, in the edgy, bold-brush-stroke style Keli’s story demands; and the five-strong acting cast rise to the challenge magnificently, with Liberty Black heartbreakingly raw, angry and quick-witted as Keli, and Karen Fishwick superb as her broken Mum, among other roles.

A beautiful metaphor to do with pressure runs through the show; a reflection on the pressures suffered by miners then and Keli now, and how extreme air pressure from the lungs - harnessed by brass players - can help build something beautiful, what Keli calls great cathedrals of sound.

And the play also captures how those pressures were and are entangled with questions of class, even in an age of individualism bereft of the political solidarity and high moral aspirations that gave William Knox’s generation hope; leaving survivors like Keli with only the band music, celebrated in the play’s glorious finale, to offer them a glimpse of what might be possible, in a more humane and convivial world.

Keli is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 17 May; then Dundee Rep 22-24 May, Perth Theatre 4-7 June, and Tramway, Glasgow 11-14 June.

READ MORE: Lau's Martin Green on Keli, his new National Theatre of Scotland show: 'I fell in love with brass bands'