Theatre: Beanfield by Shaun McCarthy directed by David Lockwood at Bike Shed Exeter and Tobacco Factory Bristol

Beanfield

Written by Sean McCarthy
Directed by David Lockwood
Produced by the Particular Theatre Company
The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter: 1st - 19th June 2010
The Tobacco Factory, Bristol: 24th Auigust- 4th September

It is 25 years since the Battle of the Beanfield, a confrontation between the police forces of several counties and a peace convoy of new age travellers on their way to Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice, a fourteenth free festival that would have established the event by right. It occurred at the high watermark of Thatcherism and for many symbolises her government's strategy: to create enemies without or within, demonise them with the assistance of a right-wing press and then defeat them by force of arms. However, unlike the Falklands War and the miners' strike, it seems to have faded in the collective memory, despite being the police operation that led to the largest number of arrests in British history - 1,600 officers took over 500 citizens into custody, filling holding cells all over England with men and women, their children taken into care. Years later, the justice system begrudgingly acknowledged their innocence and police guilt but by then, lives had been ruined and a way of life erased from the landscape.

Why this anniversary has been overlooked when our media is usually hungry for the nostalgia of recent history is partly because of the lack of documentary footage of the event. Photographers on the scene were few and what news footage was filmed was mysteriously deleted or edited. In our age of internet media what has survived has surfaced on youtube, and can be seen by anyone, but back then were were dependent on the news barons of Fleet Street and Broadcasting house. There was something almost medieval about the confrontation as the police systematically destroy the travellers' homes and beat them into submission. What few independent witnesses there were on site still talk of their shock that such force could be deployed at so much cost to deal with what were mainly the refugees of recession, rogues by necessity but hardly potential revolutionaries.

The challenge for writer, cast and director is how to give the event context and reduce it from the widescreen to a small stage, telling human stories to capture a historic event from multiple perspectives. Shaun McCarthy looks to Shakespeare for his inspiration. The prelude to the Battle takes place in the Forest of Arden of a Midummer Night's Dream while the Battle itself draws from the history plays for lessons in how to conjure up largescale confl;ict with a small cast and a few props on a few boards of stage.

Key to success or failure of the endeavour of the venture is Steamer, the narrator and central protagonist played with energy, conviction and insight by Ben Crispin. This is his first major role since qualifying at Exeter's Cygnet Theatre drama school; it won't be his last. It is Crispin's charisma and drive that gives the momentum drama as Steamer steps out of his own tragi-comedy of a love story and into those of others, still seeking to understand what happened years on. Writing this review weeks after seeing the production, Steamer still lives in my dreams while the other characters have faded into the background; give him a chance, he might just find his way into yours.



The first act is one of setup and explication. If you are of that time and place, it may seem laboured, but no doubt necessary to situate characters and audience. The roles established are convenient to the development of several themes of the play. Steamer's girlfriend Annie is herself the daughter of a news editor, taking a break out of what has otherwise been a cosseted life; seeking purpose, flirting with danger. Katie Villa is well cast to walk a sometimes meandering line between innocence and experience and it is her character and gives many in the audience a door from their life into that of a band of vagrants who were more often choosing the convoy over sink estates and urban squats than slumming it for fun, although there was plenty of fun to be had along the way.

Diane is a west country innocent picked up by chance en route and Georgie Rennolds who plays her combines naivety and nous in a persona that becomes more layered as the drama unravels until it his her experience and its telling that you trust more than any other. She also plays the female half of a Midlands couple due to take a trip through the West Country and again gives her character development that becomes insight, however simplified the implied conflict between working and non-working class is represented as being. Again, McCarthy takes from Shakespeare that combination of cartoon characterisation and plotlines that depend on coincidence for credence with a quality of language that enables the actors to transcend and subvert audience expectations. 

The demands of the production mean all of the cast apart from Crispin have to play a variety of roles so the foot soldiers of the battle are in place when the action begins, whether police, council or convoy. Ben Simpson as Benny and as Eli Thorne as Lex are asked to represent the light and dark sides of both convoy and police and while these minor roles are more symbols than characters, they dodeliver their keynote speeches with gusto and bring enough energy to the stage in the battle scene that you feel you are seeing a telephoto view of a wideangle conflict. It is a credit to cast and David Lockwood's direction that the set piece scenes are conjured up by just five actors and a flexible set that is cunningly designed by Phil Wyatt to become any of the many settings the play demands while also saying something of a mobile life off odds and ends, its frammework and props something that could be constructed from the contents of any hardware store.

The second half of the play opens with the battle scene that is necessarily noisy and brutal but then takes us through the immediate aftermath and into the later eighties when bust has turned to boom and there is money to be made even by the more savvy of those like Steamer who were once left behind. In many ways, this is the most interesting part of the play. Leave travellers in their battered buses and you only see a segment of their lives because few except those born to the convoy began their lives on the road and, given the sequence of laws that were passed in the five years after the battle that the play relates like a magna carta of rights taken away, most have long abandoned the lifestyle or fled to southern europe where casual work is more available year round. Steamer has got off the bus but still has the light of life in his eyes while in others from the past he encounters by chance, it already seems to have died.

Veterans of the conflict - for this was just the largest of many battles that ended at Castlemorton in 1990, the last of the great free festivals when new age and rave cultures merged on common land for a week or two of fuck-you paryting - attended rehersals on a number of occasions but in the end it is writer and director who had to find a few stories among the many to make sense of what happened to a modern audience and say something worth saying today. In that, they largely succeed. Back then, I was flirting with the lifestyle myself, a weekend hippie and armchair anarchist hitching my way to free fesivals across southern England. But in just the same way as union laws were rewritten after Orgreave and Wapping, so the trend towards a progressive denial of civil liberties and ever-increasing surveillance began at the Beanfield. However confused resistance was in that movement, it wasn't futile although it was defeated.

As another young generation are dispossessed and see the life opportunities they thought they were born to evaporate, so a new movement will begin and this time it will be better organised, at once less visible and more effective. By looking back to Shakespeare, McCarthy reminds us that the English peasantry have a long history of rebellion. Any history play has to do more than describe a particular set of events if it is to survive. Yes, the play is one of archetypes playing out plot lines we've seen before in familiar ways but that is both its point and purpose. I have seen all of Particular Theatre's productions so far and rate this as the one most likely to have a deserved life of its own beyond the Bike Shed stage.

Theatre: Review - 'The Distance', Particular Theatre Company, Bike Shed Theatre

In our February show on Sunday we previewed the Particular Theatre Company's production of 'The Distance', a dystopian drama of the near-future written by Craig Norman and directed by David Lockwood. Yesterday I went to the first night of a three week run (8th to 27th February) in the newly opened The Bike Shed Theatre situated in the heart of Exeter between Fore Street and Mary Arches Street.

Particular's autumn production of 'Forsaken' was put on in the cellar of the Hour Glass Inn and featured in my piece on pub theatre. The new, semi-permanent venue is better described as pop-up theatre - a former basement restaurant taken initially on a four-month lease makes an ideal seventy seat theatre space complete with a well-stocked bar - you can take a glass to your seat and replenish it during the interval - that looks like it's been imaginatively furnished from a funky junk shop because it has.

Otto Retro are one of several local companies who deserve credit for part-funding the project in cash or kind. Other Fore Street shops Electric Gypsy and Bunyip contributed costumes. The Bike Shed have lent their name to the theatre and their money to get it up and running while The Fat Pig on John Street not only put on special meal-and-a-drink deal for theatre goers but also support the venture.

Exeter Arts Council have likewise contributed - and if Particular Theatre Company are to survive on more than good will, no doubt they'll need more public money in future from a diminishing pot - but I think it important to mention sponsors when times are hard to encourage well matched local partnerships such as this.

Also to mutual credit and advantage is the  involvement of the Cygnet Training Theatre - for those who don't know The New Theatre at Friar's Gate in Exeter, keep an eye on its programme - Exeter College and Exeter University. Students will be involved in the front-of-house team and some of the 10 o'clock shows (one act plays free to all-comers), while the cast of the main production is both trained and experienced, an excellent way to introduce young drama and arts management students to professional theatre.

On to the review... On Sunday's The Blah Blah Blah Show Rachel McCarthy and I discussed the cinema of the post-apocalypse when reviewing 'The Road', wondering if end-of-the-world art reemerges at times of tension - the early sixties after the Cuban missile crisis, the early eighties at the height of the cold war and the turn of the current decade as the left worry about climate change while the right focus on the threat of terrorists and rogue nations.

'The Distance' might be described as theatre of the pre-apocalypse, and that to me is more interesting. How we'd react in a world that is broken - really broken, as it is in 'The Road' - would be a matter of brute survival. But how we respond as a society is breaking asks more immediate and interesting questions, the situation being much easier to project ourselves into, the scenario of the play one that might not be so far away - once the dominoes of civilisation start falling, perhaps we are so interdependent, they'll all come tumbling down.

So the world of 'The Distance' is wholly recognisable to us, and the four characters that occupy it are ones we can empathise with - a husband and wife, a mother and son, a daughter and her father - and so their reactions to breakdown, personal and societal, are ones we can understand. Madness begins to seem like a sane reaction. And if escapism is not the answer, at least it avoids the question, as does intoxication - and I'll drink to that.

Or do we hang onto the trappings of civilisation, fiddle while Rome burn? Would you bring a child into this world? And if you did, would you want it to live, when it could never be safe from harm? These are the sorts of questions Craig Norman wrestles with in his script, and if the play doesn't provide any easy answers, the same uncertainties will be nagging away at you 24 hours later - and that is the mark of a worthwhile piece of art, it shadows your lungs.

We react to tragedy in different ways: some couples it brings closer together, others it drives apart. We look to others for protection, only to discover they can't even defend themselves. That is where the young couple, whose relationship is the hinge the play swings on, are at when the play begins on a stage that takes up almost half of the auditorium, lives lived in three dimensions from the outset, not squashed into a corner as in some boutique theatres. That gives the set and sound designers a space to work with and they do a good job, painting in a palette of whites and greys, conjuring up a soundscape of millenarian tension.

The first act is a single scene; the second alternates between double headers either side of the stage, bisected by two metal pillars the direction makes use of rather than denying; the third, almost a coda, is an intimate conversation on the lip of the stage that hints at reconciliation, but whether with the future or in the past we are left unsure. We are always inside private domains, but there are enough references for us to know what ever is going on outside, we don't want to be there; that if it comes bursting through the door, it won't be a welcome guest. David Lockwood has to negotiate us through an emotional landscape in which the characters are never quite connecting, despite all the connections between them, and must fill that surprisingly large stage with a small cast, succeeding on both counts.

Charlie Coldfield as Darby impressed with a deceptive lightness of being that didn't mask the desperation behind his eyes. Alison Collinge as Alex has the most demanding role, taking her character to the edge of madness without ever quite tumbling over into the abyss, and brings us back to her with a vulnerability that was perhaps always tat he root of their attraction. The words 'husband' and 'wife' are used over again, reminding you that some relationships sustain almost as a matter of fact against the furies. 'Mother' and 'father' are, even more so, archetypes that cannot be denied. Jane Bennett as Nora brings her experience to bear on a role that has to combine maternal grit with a sense of imminent surrender. David Watkinson as Peter is hollow-eyed and half-absent, having left his better self behind on the front of some unspecified conflict, his daughter relating to him almost wholly as her protector of the past, a role he didn't always fulfill. 

A first night is never perfect and rarely fully realised. This is a demanding play that requires is cast to portray - and audience believe in - some extreme situations and then deal with the emotional fallout. The way in which they do so is very English - and that switchback between confrontation and restraint is the heartbeat of the piece that relies on both full-on and nuanced dramatisation. I'm tempted to return for the last night of the run to see how the performance and its staging have progressed, and it is a play that will benefit from a second sitting.

Particular Theatre is taking risks with this project. They aren't presenting populist theatre. There are no names involved sufficient to draw an audience. This is a play for a bleak February evening, leaving us with a slight chill, a longing for something warm. The Company will rely initially on goodwill and then word of mouth and intrigue in the kind of evening Exeter usually lacks, a dare for the city to respond with its feet and put some bums on seats.

They have already committed to two further productions which I for one look forward to. 'Still' by Steve Lambert from 12th April to 1st May will be previewed in excerpt at the 10 o'clock show on 26th February while a scene from 'Beanfield' by Shaun McCarthy, forthcoming in June, will feature on 27th February.

In between, another eight short dramas will be premiered, all written by south-west writers and free of charge to the audience of the main show and passersby. Last night and tonight featured 'Good Morning', a ten minute two-handed skit on suicide, by Isley Lynn. Check the website for the roster over the remainder of the three week run.

If the venue intrigues you, two evenings of music, poetry, stand-up, drama and sketches - 'Antidote / Anecdote' - are scheduled for Sundays 14th and 21st of February from 6pm to 10pm. We are promised tables with candles and both frivolous and thought provoking entertainment.

Why not spend your weekend getting behind the Bike Shed and combine a variety Sunday with a Saturday night of serious drama?