IT was not exactly the interview I had expected.

Director Rod Dixon was lined up to talk about Red Ladder theatre company’s union-commissioned musical comedy looking at the 1984/85 miners’ strike through the eyes of three sisters in a Yorkshire pit village.

But that morning the Leeds-based company had been told it was the lose its entire Arts Council funding from April 2015. Dixon was in the middle of rehearsals for We’re Not Going Back, which starts a UK tour at the Durham Miners’ Gala on Wednesday, when the news broke.

Dixon, although obviously disappointed by the 100 per cent funding cut, remains bullish and determined to carry on Red Ladder’s work by some means. The three-year plan submitted to the Arts Council remains a wish list, but the means to carry it out are slim.

“We can’t do it all, but will try to do some of it,” he says.

His immediate concern in We’re Not Going Back, written by ex-Chumbawamba guitarist and writer Boff Whalley. The play was commissioned by the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside regions of Unite the Union. Red Ladder, which has performed at the miners’ gala for the past two years, was asked to come up with a piece about the 1980s miners strike.

“Boff and I were desperately careful not to be a stereotypical left wing theatre company.

We want to make theatre that provokes conversations,” explains Dixon, Red Ladder’s artistic director.

“Rather than make a play about pickets and police and how grim it was – which it was – we decided we wanted to make a comedy.

When we spoke to people in mining communities the women said that’s absolutely what it should be, for some of us it was the best years of our lives and we had real laughs. It gave the women a voice – and divorces – because the men were a little emasculated by it.

The women held the community together.”

We’re Not Going Back follows the fortunes of three sisters – Olive, Mary and Isabel (played by Victoria Brazier, Claire Marie Seddon and Stacey Sampson) – hit hard by the government’s war against the miners and determined to set up a branch of Women Against Pit Closures.

“One social club we went to said if it was a grim play people wouldn’t come but if it was a comedy we’d pack the place out,” says Dixon.

“So Boff has written a really beautiful, moving piece with music – folksy music – which is very funny in places, but I will be disappointed if we don’t have grown men weeping into their beer.”

The events of the miners’ strike remain in the background with the story of the three sisters occupying centre stage. The union did make some restrictions, including wanting no mention of miners leader Arthur Scargill although Dixon says they’ve managed to get a “cheeky mention” of him once in the script.

The tour will take Red Ladder – founded in London in 1968 and rooted in the radical socialist theatre movement in Britain known as agitprop – into coal mining districts around the country.

The union’s involvement began through Unite Education which, Dixon says, sees the arts as a way of not just entertaining but “radicalising in a soft way” and educating working class people to go into politics.

“We just wanted to make theatre about social change. Over the last eight years my central issue has been struggle in all its forms and trying very hard to avoid polemic. You want the audience to be immersed in the piece and then think about it.”

  • Tour dates: July 9-11, Durham Miners’ Gala, Miners Hall, Red Hill, Durham.

Box office 03000-266600 Oct 8, The Royalty, Sunderland. 0191-5672669 Oct 9, Washington Arts Centre. 0191-2193455 Oct 10, The Witham, Barnard Castle. 01833-631107.