YORK writer-director Mark Herman made his tragicomic film Brassed Off at the height of the Yorkshire pit closure programme of the 1990s.

York Theatre Royal presents Paul Allen's stage adaptation to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1984 Miners' Strike, in a year when time has been called upon the all-singing, all-dancing Selby coalfield. Anger, tears, defiant laughter, rise once more in a night of spiritual theatre and bristling brass music that celebrates community, Yorkshire, and beautiful brass.

The year is 1994, and the miners of financially viable Grimley Colliery in South Yorkshire are facing a ballot, where saying yes to a £23,000 redundancy package will be saying No Future to the pit.

Meanwhile, Danny (Fine Time Fontayne) is fighting on two fronts: struggling against the twin forces of pneumoconiosis and the pit band failing to meet his exacting standards.

Son Phil (Andrew Dunn) is fighting too: struggling to keep his family and his knackered trombone in one piece with the loan sharks and repo man at his door. Wife Sandra (Andrina Carroll, from a North Eastern mining family) has four children to feed on stale bread. Son Shane (Luke Adamson) narrates the tale, looking back on his younger self in '94, symbolically conducting the band, but unable to wave a magic wand at the play's end.

Into the story come bantering, boozing brass-band players Harry (John Davitt) and Jim (John Banks), picket line wives Rita and Vera (Meriel Scholfield, Kate Wood), and the Romeo and Juliet of the piece, young miner Andy (Gareth Farr) and leggy British Coal researcher Gloria (Ann Marcuson). Add the Shepherd Building Group Brass Band or Harrogate Band, and there is fantastic, heart-felt playing all round.

The theatrical retelling is even more powerful than Herman's impassioned film. Cinema's magic dust and star players are replaced in Damian Cruden and Richard Twyman's magnificent, moving and bloody funny production by flesh and blood, miners' sweat and brass players' spittle, coal dust and actors with mining connections. None more so than Fine Time Fontayne, real name Ian Crossley, son of a Wombwell miner of 30 years' graft. His rendition of Danny's final speech, on human worth, bleeds from deep wounds.

Laugh until you cry.

Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 11:02 Thursday, September 09, 2004