PICK Me Up Theatre cast members Bill Laverick, Susannah Baines and Mark Hird are all new to north eastern playwright Lee Hall’s award-winning drama The Pitmen Painters, which opens in York on Tuesday.

“It means you can come up with a fresh view on it,” says native north easterner Bill, who will play coal-face worker Jimmy Floyd, one of the group of 1930s miners in Ashington, Northumberland, that decides to study art appreciation in evening classes and goes on to become prolific painters, soon to be the toast of the British art world.

“I never like to see something before doing it, but I’d love to see the play now, if we weren’t doing it,” adds Bill.

Susannah admits she had never heard of the play, let alone seen it, but is delighted to be playing wealthy art collector Helen Sutherland, who befriends the miners and offers to be a benefactor to one in particular.

“Like Bill and Mark, I’m fresh to it. Mark and I play the ‘posh’ people here, the collector and the art tutor; the rest are miners, who speak their mind, and so the humour is fantastic in this piece as we’re lampooned by the miners,” she says.

“Towards the end, when Helen doesn’t get what she wants, she is shown in her true colours, using and abusing the painters at will, which is great to play. In the first half, there’s a lot of comedy, but in the second half, Helen’s much darker, and that adds to the attraction of the role.”

Mark Hird, again new to Hall’s play, takes the role of Robert Lyon, the group’s art tutor.

“He is the inspiration who gets them painting, after being the source of early humour in the play because of their inability to be on the same level of communication in his art appreciation classes,” says Mark.

“What I like about Lyon is that he’s this traditionalist who prefers figurative work to abstract, and gets left behind when the pitmen painters’ tastes go beyond his, but at the same time he’s a radical, because he goes forward with this Ashington group in a way that others wouldn’t. At the end, he has this message for one of the group, Oliver Kilbourn, encouraging him to go out and make something new at this time of great aspiration.”

Coming to the play without foreknowledge, Mark has been surprised most by its “incredible themes”. “Culture. Class. Art. Society. Education. You describe it to people and it sounds heavy, but it’s not. It’s the best theatre; all this humour, but also all this pathos too,” he says. “There’s that sense of hope and aspiration, when you have people aspiring to things through education but you also learn that things didn’t that they aspired to.

“We’re putting this play on in the week that everyone goes to the polls and if people saw it, they would have so much food for thought about education.”

Bill’s roots have come in handy with his fellow cast members, educating them in the accent. “I’m helping as much as I can,” he says. “I’ve told them to hit certain phrases regularly and to concentrate on your vowels.”

• Pick Me Up Theatre presents The Pitmen Painters, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, Tuesday to Saturday, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or at pickmeuptheatre.com Charles Hutchinson