Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters tells a story quite extraordinary — of a group of miners who make it big in the world of art — and its stage history, like that of Hall’s other smash hit Billy Elliot, is scarcely less so.

“As a playwright you expect your work to be on six weeks maximum,” he says in a gentle voice still quite clearly revealing of his roots in Newcastle, where he was born in 1966, the son of a painter and decorator. “Now we are coming up to six years. “

None of us realised, I think, how much the story would touch people. I suppose many of us have a gift they would like to be able to do something with but have little opportunity to do so. People identify with the story; it’s quite moving.”

Hall’s introduction to the tale began in an art bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road, in the days following the success of Billy Elliot. He spotted a copy of Pitmen Painters by the art critic William Feaver.

“Pitmen Painters sounded like an oxymoron. I flicked through it and knew I would have to buy it. A few chapters in, and I knew I had the subject for my next play.”

Feaver’s book focused on the Ashington Group, which was made up largely of miners from the Northumbrian colliery town of that name who came together through a Workers’ Educational Association class begun in 1934 under the inspired tutelage of Robert Lyon, later head of the Edinburgh College of Art.

“The story fed into so many of the themes that I am interested in,” Hall says, “including class, art and exclusion. I was very interested in that they had, like Billy Elliot, escaped from their working class to go and be artists. Though they decided to stay working in the mines, they became celebrities and got to know people like Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson.

"I got in touch with Bill [Feaver] and he was incredibly helpful. He had known all of the group when he was a young man. He was generous in allowing me access to personal diaries and the like that gave the human dimension to the play.”

The Pitmen Painters was first staged to celebrate the refurbishment of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live Theatre. An instant hit, it was next taken up as a co-production with the National Theatre. It has now been seen three times at the NT’s base on the South Bank, each time in a bigger auditorium. It has also played in the West End and on Broadway and been out on national tours.

The first of these took in Milton Keynes. Reviewing the production there for The Oxford Times in October 2009, I saw particular inspiration in the example of group member Oliver Kilbourne, evidently an excellent artist.

“I can pass opinion on his talents,” I noted, “because one of the splendid features of this production is we get to see some of the works produced by the artists projected on to large screens hanging above the stage. It is a thrilling moment indeed when Oliver’s first picture — a lincocut of a miner at the coalface is displayed in all its savage power.”

Oliver later becomes the focus of a minor crisis for the group when he is offered a handsome stipend — rather more than he earns down the pit — by a rich benefactor, shipping heiress Helen Sutherland, who wants him to become a full-time artist.”

So gripping is the play that one naturally wonders whether — in a reversal of the Billy Elliot trajectory — Hall had felt tempted to switch it from stage to screen.

“A number of people have suggested that, but I think I’d like it to play out its theatrical life first.”

In an extremely busy period in his creative life, he currently has three projects on the go. Project one is a screenplay for Film 4 of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. He is also writing a film about 1930s cricketer (and former miner) Harold Larwood, reckoned to be the fastest bowler of his day. “That’s completing my mining trilogy!”

Finally, he is collaborating with Sir Tom Stoppard in turning his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love into a new stage play. “He is incredibly busy, so needed an apprentice,” jokes Lee. “Seriously, he wanted someone to help him see it with fresh eyes."

Oxford Playhouse
Monday (July 29) until Saturday August 3
Tickets: £13.50-£29
 Call 01865 305305 or visit oxfordplayhouse.co.uk