"People lost jobs, respect, dignity, families and lives, and the enormous significance comes across in emotive speeches magnificently delivered"

The Bolton News

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Remembering 25 years of the Great Miners’ strike, most of the original cast of David Thacker’s groundbreaking 1985 production return to present The Enemies Within.

Using real-life accounts assembled from interviews with striking miners and their families, this pioneering work represents a unique period of the 20th century that changed this country forever and tells the real stories behind the headlines.

What the critics said in 1985:

"Using the starkly revealing words of the actual participants, Ron Rose’s account of the recent conflict in the coalfields is a powerful piece of documentary theatre. It’s a shocking experience. This howl of outrage may have lit a fire, even in somnambulant England hard to put out. The Company are wonderful." CITY LIMITS

"Its verbatim accounts, assembled from countless interviews with striking miners and their families, speak of an open wound which no one has troubled to heal. It is a recurring theme of injustice coupled with victimisation. A packed audience received it all with rapt acclaim." THE DAILY MAIL

"There are chilling scenes of faces bloodied, accounts of heads cracked open and impressions of an almost universally unsympathetic outside world of housewives, doctors and television producers. The acting is reverberatively fine." THE GUARDIAN

"I see a great future for this play touring cities like Moscow, Sofia and Prague where they will welcome the news that the British Police State is even more brutal than their own." LONDON STANDARD

Writer Ron Rose has written more than 60 plays performed by many of the country's leading theatres. His extensive TV credits include The Bill, Heartbeat, Between the Lines and the critically acclaimed Love and Reason.