Written by Evie Grace Cryer
A young man in black sprints across the stage, waving a Great British flag as Reform jargon echoes through the speakers. He isn’t in Paul Allen’s 1996 original script.
He is Amy Leach’s addition to her new staging of Brassed Off at the Leeds Playhouse this summer. For a moment, the audience stops watching a period piece about the Thatcherite pit closures of 1994 and starts watching themselves, their own peers cast as the actors. The play is about us, in 2026. The young man is a symbol of the new generation: community-less and opportunity-less, being exploited by right-wing politicians who turn their suffering into political leverage. Leach’s ability to pin a red thread from 1996 to the present is what this article seeks to trace.
The play ultimately helps reveal that the rise of Reform is not a symptom of gullibility, but a product of history, one where a Conservative government wrote off its own people in the name of ‘liberal economic efficiency.’
This is why this production deserves more than a run in Leeds, but an audience in the South, and most importantly, an audience in Whitehall.
Play Overview:
Amy Leach’s rendition of Paul Allen’s stage production of ‘Brassed Off’ at the Leeds Playhouse follows the fictional town of Grimley in the North of England in 1992. It focuses on the Grimley Miners’ Colliery brass band, dissolved because of the Thatcherite pit closures.
With the pit gone, Grimley loses its industrial heart, and with it the money that would go into community activities, including their beloved brass band. The play is not concerned with the economics of the closures, but with their human cost. For characters like Phil, Jim and Harry, the band was not peripheral but central to their lives: for Phil, its disbandment was enough to drive him to attempt suicide.
This play shows us how tearing out a town’s economic heart not only threatens its livelihood but dismantles the very thing that keeps people stable: their sense of community and, in turn, their sense of self.
From Fiction to Fact:
Grimley’s story is far from fictitious, and the impact of the Thatcherite era still plays out today. It is plainly written in the statistics. According to Sheffield Hallam University’s State of the Coalfields 2024 Report, life expectancy in the coalfields runs about a year below the national average, and around three years below the Southeast.
The reason for this is clear. Without economic security, towns fall into disrepair, and people’s wellbeing suffers. Youth centres and community halls are forced to close, taking with them the places people go for company and support. Independent businesses pack up and move as high streets become barren, leaving young people with nowhere to go and little reason to stay.
For this reason, the play is not a story of the past but a narrative still unfolding. Whether it’s a colliery band or a youth centre, people then and now are being stripped of their sense of belonging and, in turn, their livelihoods.
Leach’s Predictions for the Future:
Yet Leach’s staging of the production does not merely diagnose the problem, but begins to predict the future. This returns us to the man with the flag: a young man from some future version of Grimley waving a Great British flag. This same boy can be found amongst the crowds at the UTK marches, like the one just outside LSE campus back in May this year.
Leach hints that young men at these rallies are all too similar to those in Grimley: without a community to protect them, they become vulnerable to hardships. Right-wing populists are all too willing to exploit these men, providing false answers as to why they are suffering, and leveraging them for political popularity. Immigrants, it tells him, are why he has no work; feminism is why he has no partner; liberal academics are why he cannot trust what he reads.
It is this link, between the loss of community bred by industrial decline and the rise of right-wing populism, that explains why post-industrial towns have become such fertile ground for Reform. And the polling bears it out. According to a ‘Hope not Hate’ survey from November 2025, polling shows that Reform’s core base is situated across post-industrial towns in the North and East of England.
What this play tells us is that the anger on the picket line and the anger at the UTK marches trace back to the same root.
A Play with a Solution:
Yet Leach refuses to close the curtains on this hopeless note. Instead, the play offers a solution. It’s what happens to this young man at the end of the play that points to a possible cure for this ring-wing epidemic.
When he comes on stage for the final time, he is met by Shane, Sandra and Phil’s son, who replace his flag with a baton, and his puffer with a red performance jacket, drawing him into the heart of the community band. The message could not be clearer. Give people access to a community, and they will turn towards good.
In real terms, this means investing in things that sustain a community: music, the arts, sports and leisure. Protect community spaces, and invest in them more, especially during times of austerity like these. Invest in the people who feel ‘forgotten,’ like Northern communities that inspired Allen’s play.
Brassed Off shows us the destruction that politics can cause, but, in the same breath, the way back.
