revew: Breach Theatre – The Beanfield
The Beanfield/
by Breach Theatre/
dir by Dorothy Allen-Pickard & Billy Barrett/
HOME/
31/03 – 02/04/16//
‘Breach’s debut fringe show is both formally ambitious and explicitly political – an engaged, potent piece of theatremaking by a young company with a strong creative identity.’
– Natasha Tripney
‘It’s true! @breach_theatre’s The Beanfield *is* brilliant. So intelligently layered. A politics of justice, remembrance, action & heart’
– Cristina Delgado
‘Maybe it’s because the performers talk directly to the screen as if they’re interviewing the people there and then, turning the screen almost into a character itself. Maybe it’s because it reiterates again the failure of our attempts to present *real* things on stage. Even though we hear these testimonies directly, they’re preserved on film like an artifact. These people will be replayed, their words repeated every day for the rest of The Beanfield‘s run at the Fringe. And I guess that’s not real either. If you had those people actually sat on stage to be interviewed, they wouldn’t say the same thing every day. They wouldn’t have cues. But then, that would be an interview, and not theatre, which by default suggests that theatre is an intrinsically un-real form.’
– Katie Smith
‘Breach Theatre’s attempt at a historic re-enactment of the brutal Battle of the Beanfield, then, is just as relevant as the regular weekend activities of the Sealed Knot. An idea sparked by an incident much closer to home – the 2014 aggressive police put-down of a student public meeting at Warwick University – has become a sophisticated and compelling piece of political theatre.’
– Jo Beggs
‘At an early point in the production, the company plays a recording made in December 2014 during a tuition fees protest on Warwick University campus which occurred just a few hours after the company had put in their funding application to make The Beanfield.’
– Andrew Haydon
‘The show is thoughtful, entertaining and well constructed. It is also important. As the reporter Nick Davis in the videoed interview for the play comments, “adult men with sticks violently hit many people that day… They split up parents .. taking their children into care.. (but) to this day there has been no enquiry”. This play at least helps us remember.’
– Keith Mckenna
‘The Beanfield, as I mentioned, is not verbatim. It’s better. It’s what I would love to see verbatim be replaced by. It doesn’t lie to us, not for second. If we’re receiving the words of people that were at the Beanfield in 1985, we hear it straight from the horse’s mouth on film. Or on recording, when we hear a soundbite of the utterly disgusting conduct of the police at the sit-in discussion at Warwick uni. That’s real. Entirely so. There’s no barrier there, no fourth wall, no lie, no attempt at seriously replicating what happened. It’s laid out for us as it was, and as it is.’
– Katie Smith
‘That sits—rather brilliantly—next to a student’s first Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, so vividly told it smacks of the truth. Her initial impulse is to mock, as stoned spiritualists—some in earnest, others less so—press their faces against the ‘henge to “feel the energy”. As drugs kick in, though, so does sincerity.’
– Matt Trueman
‘All this flexing of the form doesn’t mean for a second, though, that the piece is any less moving. Quite the contrary, really, because even though it isn’t real on stage at 10am in a theatre on the Royal Mile, it’s still real out there in the *real world*. Whether that’s the screams of students being tear-gassed and threatened with tasers, interviews of people who where there, or just the company laughing in rehearsal and then suddenly switching to seriousness.’
– Katie Smith
‘Primarily this is a brilliant bit of documentary making, reminding a whole new generation of something appalling that happened thirty years ago. But, beyond that, and far more urgent, is the unflinching implication that this isn’t one of those events that we can look back on and complacently imagine that “things were very different then,” and “it couldn’t happen now”. It absolutely can and does still happen.’
– Andrew Haydon
‘Did the heavy-handed policing of the 1980s knock the principle out of us? Breach make a strong case with real structural elegance: in dressing up and play acting, they too grow sincere, and it dawns that you’re watching the genuine politicisation of a group of young adults. Several were at a student protest in Warwick when police used CS gas and drew tasers. They play a recording: shrill screams of shock.’
– Matt Trueman
‘Choosing to mix the comedic contemporary elements with the filmed interview footage turns out to be a masterstroke. As humorous contemporary criticism mixes with hard-hitting accounts of a shameful day in British history, it is difficult not to get sucked into a kind of emotional crescendo. This feeling is only exacerbated by the brilliant closing scenes, with the strobe lighting and the fighting and the wildly wielded cricket bat. What we’re left with is an incredibly well-crafted tale on many different media. A brave and brilliant production that brings attention to something we should never have forgotten.’
– Fran Slater
‘You leave The Beanfield feeling shaken, absolutely furious, and entirely powerless. Yet, with a strong conviction that at least the future is in the hands of some seriously smart, seriously politically committed theatremaker/activists.’
– Andrew Haydon
knickd frm
http://www.thereviewshub.com/the-beanfield-home-manchester/
http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=6195
https://twitter.com/C_DelgadoGarcia/status/716014539708432384
https://www.festmag.co.uk/theatre/102841-the_beanfield
http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/the-beanfield-space-on-the-mi-11844
http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-beanfield-thespace-on-mile-edinburgh.html
https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2015/beanfield/
https://katzsmitz.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/ed-fred-3-the-beanfield/