For a quarter of a century, Beryl dominated British cycling (not to mention being five times world champion), even occasionally outperforming her male counterparts. Her 12-hour record was better than the men’s mark for two years (1967-69). It would take 50 years for another woman to pass it.

The list of her sporting achievements is genuinely astonishing (and perhaps the emotional peak of the evening, when they are listed at the finale). This is all the more remarkable, given that as a young teenager, Beryl was struck down with a combination of rheumatic fever and St Vitus’s Dance, and was advised to avoid strenuous exercise for the rest of her life. Moral? Never tell a Yorkshirewoman what she can and can’t do.

Unfailingly supported by her husband Charlie (and with not a little backing from the Morley Cycling Club of which they were both members), Beryl observed: “There’s nobody like cycling folk. They’ll change your life.” Sykes’s production aims to draw parallels between the communal yet underfunded (certainly in Beryl’s day) sport of cycling and the struggles of contemporary theatre. Her approach has a distinctly inclusive feel to it. The fourth wall is almost entirely absent in this mix of dramatised storytelling and the sharing of background facts via direct address and slide projections.

This method plays to the strengths of Peake’s episodic script – the show is more a series of interesting, energetically-performed anecdotes than a drama. The sustained frenetic pace of the production displays a stamina that might have impressed Beryl herself.

Vicky Binns – a bundle of energy and tenacity – is perfectly cast as the grown-up Beryl (though it’s hard not to feel that she has more depths to give as an actor than script and direction allow, here). Flora Spencer-Longhurst charms as the young Beryl and then Denise, Beryl’s daughter who grew to be a champion in her own right. Chris Jack as Charlie Burton, the loyal husband who introduced Beryl to cycling and encouraged and supported her throughout, has an eager warmth that wins the audience over. Dramatically, it feels like there was more to be wrung from this fascinating triangle – but that’s another play.

Matthew Heywood, in his professional debut, has a ball, cameoing a vast range of characters, including Beryl’s tough father, Charlie’s mother, cycling champion Mike McNamara, a German policeman and a nun.

As Movement Consultant for this all-action show mounted in a compact auditorium, Kaitlin Howard has surely earned her money.

With work on the re-modelling of its home ongoing, this Octagon production is housed across the road in Bolton Central Library’s cosy theatre.

Get on your bike and support the cause. Let’s not allow the wheels to come off this admirable regional producing house.

Octagon Theatre Bolton’s production of Beryl by Maxine Peake is at the Library Theatre, Bolton from 19 September to 19 October 2019.

Read our interview with Beryl director Kimberley Sykes about directing As You Like It for the RSC.

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Fiona Whitelaw’s 2016 play Tinned Goods recently brought some of these stories to the fore, focusing on three generations of women in a mining community, and how the strike not only impacted on them financially and materially, but also on their friendships, families and relationships.

Relationships and the relevance of political decisions to every fabric of life are also at the centre of Maxine Peake’s new play, Queens of the Coal Age.

Set in Lancashire, it’s based on the true story of four women: Anne (Kate Anthony), Dot (Jane Hazlegrove), Lesley (Danielle Henry) and Elaine (Eve Robertson), who occupied Parkside Colliery in Newton-Le-Willows as a 5 day protest for Women Against Pit Closures.

It’s 1993, almost 10 years after the year-long strike of the 1980s. Since then the industry had seen pit closures year-on-year, and as we meet these four friends, Parkside Colliery is next on the list.

John Major is now Prime Minister, although he is never mentioned. Margaret Thatcher is still the enemy figure. As Lesley says, “She’s done for the name Margaret what Hitler did for little moustaches!”

Peake’s script is littered with barbed one-liners, which brings dark humour to an otherwise heavy subject and keeps pace in a largely static and claustrophobic play. For the most part the women are stuck in one dark space and we all know how it’s going to end.

We are told they are ‘ordinary’ women. Yet one is Anne Scargill, wife of Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers.

Peake does well to humanise the face of what is sometimes seen as a caricatured battle between Scargill and Thatcher. But her characters also brush aside comments about his illegal strike as ignorance, when the National Union of Mineworkers failure to hold a national strike ballot was a dividing factor in mining communities and went against what many miners believed was fair and democratic. Having this raised by a manager, portrayed as a comedy character, tells the audience what the playwright thinks they should think. There are points when it feels close to a political soap box, but Peake resists this by bouncing the dialogue quickly between characters.

Director Bryony Shanahan makes sure we never forget the cause for which the women are fighting, with falling coal dust and ghostly groups of miners wandering through the darkness. We are also left in no doubt of the hardship these women experienced both underground and on the outside. As they stand united in the iron cage bringing them back to the surface, voices of the real protestors play over the speakers. “This policeman said to me, ‘You lost.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but we went down fighting. And that matters’.”

Queens of the Coal Age is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 28 June – 28 July before transferring to the New Vic theatre in Stoke-on-Trent.

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After ten or so plays together – including an intense Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a shape-shifter in The Skriker and a gender-fluid, Hamlet – familiarity could make for a comfortable relationship. Yet, the pairing is a sure audience winner because their work never sits in a comfortable space.

Happy Days in this way is no different. Indeed, there can’t be many plays that present more restrictions for both actor and director of a theatre in the round.

Like all Beckett plays, it is not so much a story as a metaphorical contemplation on existence, with the focus on the fullness of the character, their actions and intonations more so than what it is they say. Here, influenced by the environmental emergency caused by plastic pollution, Frankcom expands the metaphor beyond the human condition, to present a stark picture of the planet’s suffocation.

We meet Winnie (Peake), waist-deep atop a grassy knoll that has seen better days – more mud than grass and most of what grass remains has been scorched by the sun.

Behind her, at the foot of her mound, Willie (David Crellin), her husband, has a hole of his own to crawl into. Although he can safely enter only one way, of which Winnie frequently reminds him, he is less restricted, relaxed and outstretched, half-dressed, reading a newspaper.

Winnie chats incessantly, with barely any recognition from Willie beyond the odd grunt or a raised finger. Yet despite her isolation and immobility, Winnie remains stoically chipper, repeatedly declaring, ‘This is going to be a happy day’.

She is the archetypal keeping-up appearances housewife, even sounding like a younger, Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet). Her day is brought to an abrupt start by a fire-alarm shrill and blinding spotlights. Seemingly ignoring this daily assault on the senses, Winnie is beautifully dressed in a pink linen dress and matching hat, focusing on what she can, peering in her glass to make minute adjustments to how the spectacles sit on her face. Even reading the writing on her toothbrush and discovering a new word, brings a sense of joy.

As she takes items from her bag, some are discarded, without care, to fall among a pile of rotting rubbish. It’s all very mundane until we realise that sitting among her lipsticks and comb is a gun.

Designer, Naomi Dawson has created the knoll as a small island on a slow revolve, surrounded by discoloured water and washed-up plastics. Peake’s precision in both her movement and clipped speech, captures the audience and keeps them focused for the full two hours she is on stage. This is no small task, as during the second act her movement is restrained further with the character now buried up to her neck.

In this second act Peake’s face is projected on screens above her head. While this allows the audience to see her expressions at all times during the revolve, it is also a further restriction for her performance, requiring her to focus on the lens below for the whole act. Meanwhile, the gun sits beside her head – a constant threat, like climate change, largely ignored.

Peake deftly pulls the dark humour from her lines and paints clear pictures of those she sees with swift accent changes. We feel her Winnie still has energy and dynamism of spirit, even though the days stretch out ahead with the same routines.

Peake is much younger than Beckett envisioned Winnie. But, in many ways, this expands the metaphor to make her character relatable in a whole multitude of situations in which people are physically, mentally or emotionally trapped.

Like Winnie, when faced with a role that could so easily be stifling, Peake and Frankcom have once again excelled.

Happy Days is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 25 May to 23 June 2018.

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