An intensely personal play by one of New Zealand’s most significant and controversial playwrights, Coaltown Blues depicts the tragedy and comedy of poverty and politics and the struggles throughout Mervyn’s childhood in a West Coast mining town. It is both a celebration and a lament for the working class roots from which he sprang.

The Boy is the only person on stage in the play. He tells the story through snippets of song and anecdotes in which he adopts the various personas of the people in his life.

These include his gruff, Soviet-worshipping, coal-miner father; the idealistic mother who maintains a desperate gentility in the face of serial pregnancies from the age of 16 and squalid, brutal surroundings; a conservative schoolmaster with a penchant for hair-related tormenting of young girls and the boys of the area: bullies, sycophants, victims and the wonderfully monikered ‘Boy of Gibbs’ who manages to escape violence by virtue of being the only bespectacled child in town.