The Old Oak

Directed by Ken Loach (2023)

Ken Loach’s new film The Old Oak is set in a Durham pit village (perhaps Easington) where the colliery has long shut down. Its memories, though, are preserved by photographs on the wall in the back room of a local pub, the Old Oak of the title.

The room has also been closed for years, through lack of custom, the framed photos forgotten, but not gone. The values they represent only come alive once more with the visit of Syrian refugee Yara (Elba Mari) who recognises in them the struggles and the solidarity of her own people.

She’s one of a group of families fleeing the war in Syria. They have lost everything. But she soon realises their new neighbours aren’t much better off, their cupboards bare.

Inspired by a photograph of the communal kitchen that served miners and their families during the Great Strike of 1984/5, she proposes the idea is revived at the Old Oak, not just for the refugees, but for everyone.

Landlord TJ (Dave Turner) is persuaded to reopen the back room as a free restaurant, funded by trade union donations, a couple of days a week with everyone mucking in to fix the broken plumbing and electrics and cook the meals.

All very pub-is-the-hub. But this is a Ken Loach film, and life’s not so simple.

Community is a lazy word. It elides a continuous battle to overcome division. Community is not a pre-existing thing, it’s a process. The Old Oak shows how pubs can be a part of the solution, but the symbolism in the name, suggesting a timeless shelter, is undermined by the reality.

The letters in the sign are falling off, TJ is skimping on the insurance, only two beers appear to be pouring (the ale is from local brewer Castle Eden – haven’t seen that for ages!). The Old Oak is withering, kept alive only because TJ understands it’s the last place left standing in the village where people can come together and forget their troubles – at least in theory.

Publicans will recognise a familiar situation in which a small group of regulars think it’s their pub and are hostile to outsiders. They are tolerated, partly because they’re mates, but also because the licensee fears that without their custom the business will collapse. They know that, of course, and exploit the fact.

Two or three of them are outright racists who want the back room themselves for a protest meeting against the new arrivals, tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence. They’re angry TJ turned them down yet opened the door for the community kitchen. Caught in the middle, the licensee wants to help the refugees but he’s reluctant to confront the regulars and tries to ignore their abusive behaviour.

It’s a tense, hard watch. Loach, and his screenwriter Paul Laverty, finely balances the hope with the despair. There’s no final victory. The struggle continues.

The Old Oak also challenges that old rule about pubs avoiding politics. It shows that’s a fantasy. That pubs are caught up in the conflicts that riddle society.

A longer version of this review first appeared in the Propel Info newsletter for the UK hospitality industry.

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