KELI review: A rousing brass-band odyssey of grief, grit, and ghosts

The National

18-05-2025

I was reminded of this insightful quote while watching KELI, writer and composer Martin Green's fine new play for the National Theatre of Scotland and his own cross-artform company Lepus.
There is, you might think, a considerable cultural distance between Harlem, New York City and West Lothian. However, like the Black jazz musician alluded to by Malcolm X, Keli Wade – the 17-year-old, working-class protagonist of Green's drama – derives her greatest spiritual fulfilment from playing the tenor horn in a brass band.
The play is set in the former Scottish coal mining town of Anston (a mildly fictionalised Whitburn). The last coal mine in the area may have closed 39 years ago following the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85, but the mining community's brass band is still going strong.
We meet Keli, who is juggling the demands of shop work at the local Scotmid, a college course and her mother's severe mental distress as she and her fellow members of the Snaresbrook brass band are preparing to travel to London. There the West Lothian musicians will take part in the finals of the National Brass Band Championships in the Albert Hall.
Green – who made the brass band documentary Banding: Love, Spit And Valve Oil for BBC Radio 4 – has long immersed himself in the culture of colliery community brass bands. In KELI – which is set in the present day – we hear resonating echoes of the community's past.
The band lives by its traditions, and there is great pride in the legendary miner, trade unionist and band leader Willie Knox, who, in the years immediately after the Second World War, led the Snaresbrook band to its famous trio of national titles. There is pride – and considerable anguish – in the memories of the strike of the mid-1980s.
During that bitter dispute, current band leader Brian Farren was badly beaten and fitted up (to the point of serving jail time) by the police.
From this mix of intriguing and combustible material, Green and director Bryony Shanahan have concocted an engrossing and, ultimately, deeply moving theatre work. Keli's journey – both literal and emotional – is like a modern reworking of the classical tale of Orpheus's adventures in the underworld.
It is not giving too much away to say that our tenor horn-playing hero's travels and travails are conducted within the frame of her encounters with the ghost of the great Willie Knox (who is played with tremendous dignity and humour by the excellent Billy Mack). His interactions with 'comrade sister' Keli combine powerfully with the angry memories of Farren (Phil McKee on convincingly gruff-yet-decent form).
Throughout the piece – from West Lothian to London and back again – the play is blessed with beautiful live playing of Green's marvellous brass score (which segues between lovely music and intelligent, atmospheric sound). The scene in which brass playing combines with hardcore electronic pop music in a London club is remarkably inventive, both theatrically and musically.
The cast is universally impressive. Led by Liberty Black (who is gloriously driven-yet-vulnerable in the role of Keli), it includes deeply affecting performances by Karen Fishwick (as Keli's mother, Jane) and the Whitburn Band.
If the production has a flaw, it is in designer Alisa Kalyanova's maximalist coal mine set, which is too literal and lacking in versatility. Nonetheless, this piece is a captivating triumph.
As the Lepus company says: 'If the mines are dead, the music and the people most definitely are not.'
Tickets can be found here. Touring until June 14.