Pride sets the story of gay activists funding the 1984 miners' strike to an original score, transferring to the Bridge Theatre after a sold-out National run.
Stephen Beresford’s musical Pride, about gay activists who funded the 1984 miners’ strike, transfers to the Bridge Theatre, London Bridge, from Thursday 12 November 2026 to Saturday 8 May 2027. Its premiere in the National’s Dorfman sold out.
In the summer of 1984, a group of lesbians and gay men in London began collecting money in buckets for the striking miners. They reasoned that the police and press treated them as they had long treated the miners.
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was founded on 30 June and ran out of Gay’s the Word bookshop. It twinned itself with a Welsh mining village in the Dulais valley, which took the money and sent its own people to London for Pride. A year later, the miners’ union voted to put gay rights into Labour’s platform.
Beresford first wrote the story as a 2014 film, which Matthew Warchus directed. He has said no history of either movement told it.
The musical sets it to an original score that draws on pop, rock, disco and Welsh choral writing, with a company singing in two idioms at once.