Steel Town

In 1999 playwright Tom Kelly and songwriter Steve Thompson joined forces to produce Steel Town, a musical based on the end of a 140-year-old steel making tradition in Consett, County Durham. The show premiered at the Customs House, South Shields in April 2000 and later the same year played to packed houses and critical acclaim in Consett itself. In a sense the story had come home but this could be a story about any community and about any industry.

In 2001 Steve and Tom reprised some of the Steel Town songs plus new ones in musical review entitled Songs of Love Work and War. This time the music and words were accompanied by images donated by Newcastle Central Library, Castleside History Society and others. These images were made all the more poignant by the songs and by the addition of voices of Steel Workers recorded by Steve, some of them his own relatives.

Now the two artists are working on a new project to take the words, music, images and stories to many different communities. The idea is to encourage communities to bring images and stories into workshop sessions to be digitised and incorporated into a show to be performed in their own community venue.