Mark Thomas: The Red Shed

The left—as we’re constantly reminded—is in crisis. Giving up and looking back at the glory days—a united Labour Party, and a strong trade union movement—is tempting. But Mark Thomas’s warm, engaging look at the state of the nation via social histories and contemporary activism highlights the need to honour the past whilst looking to the future, recapturing the spirit of the eighties but never giving in to misty-eyed nostalgia.

The Red Shed itself is the Wakefield Labour club, where Thomas has done his time in social organising, socialist pantomimes, and gallons of real ale drinking over some of the 50 years since it’s stood, opposite the local Conservative club. This moving, impassioned and often very funny show is partly a 50th anniversary celebration of the building and its members, and partly a mission to answer some questions about Thomas’s own political awakening.   

Namely, he has a vivid memory of children singing 'Solidarity Forever' through the school railings at passing strikers – but then that’s just the sort of rose-tinted, Billy Elliot view of the working class that he has no interest in propagating. Did it really happen? Armed with a Dictaphone and a hand-drawn map of the local closed pit—now a McDonalds, of course—he sets out to find those children and their rebellious teacher. In his insistence on pragmatism over romanticism, Thomas finds real heart and guts in the stories he uncovers.