Pride director Matthew Warchus, the vicar’s son from Selby with a theatre past at York Theatre Royal and West Yorkshire Playhouse and a theatre future is taking over from Kevin Spacey as the Old Vic’s artistic director.

Warchus is a man of the musicals too, from Our House to Matilda in the West End, and he has a heavyweight American movie to his name, writing and directing Nick Nolte, Sharon Stone and Jeff Bridges in 1999’s blackmail drama Simpatico.

He is North Yorkshire’s most significant arts polymath of the past 25 years and he has just made his most commercial work to date: Pride, an agit-prop political drama about gays and miners. Think Ken Loach, but much funnier.

Pride, its story 80 per cent based on truth and the rest on heightened reality, recalls a remarkable bond of “pits and perverts” that developed in 1984 under the twin shadows of coal pit closures and the new “gay plague” of AIDS that only cranked up homophobia.

A group of gay activists from London’s Out Loud theatre troupe decide to raise funds to support a Welsh mining village, then travel across the divide of more than the Severn Bridge to meet the beleaguered community. An initial cold shoulder of ant-gay prejudice gradually makes way for mutual recognition of shared enemies: the Thatcher Government, the police and the tabloid press.

Pride won’t go as viral from nowhere as Peter Cattaneo’s comic-striptease The Full Monty but it will surely match the success of Made In Dagenham, East Is East, My Beautiful Laundrette and in particular another film set at the heart of the Miners’ Strike, Brassed Off, the Yorkshire tragi-comedy by York writer-director Mark Herman.

Like Herman, Warchus combines controlled indignation and a sense of injustice needing righting with a blunt, knowing humour and ample use of invigorating music to echo the story’s emotions. Not in the form of a colliery brass band this time, but landmark records that form cultural and social signposts of an intolerant Tory regime, from Frankie’s Relax to The Communards and Billy Bragg.

Pride’s performances by the likes of “flamboyant” gay activist Dominic West and Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton’s mining-community stalwarts are theatrical more than filmic, but everything has a lightness of touch as Warchus affirms why he is his happiest when blending intelligence, truth and comedy.

Pride does exactly that; there really is power in the union of all three.