Beanfield, brought to stage by the Particular Theatre Company, is a play that tells the story of the tragic events that occurred at the Stonehenge summer solstice free festival on June 1, 1985. Shaun McCarthy’s intelligent script is played out by an energetic and engaging cast, who create a piece of thought-provoking theatre that is not to be missed.
Beanfield is a work of informative storytelling. Determined to stop the 12th consecutive free festival from occurring by any means possible, on June 1, 1985, the UK police launched Operation Solstice. A perimeter was erected around the stones, people were not permitted to approach them, and roads leaving the site were also blocked. A seven-hour stand off commenced, until the order came for scores of riot police (who had been hiding in nearby woods) to move in on the travellers and festival-goers who were being contained. Forced to flee their vehicles into a nearby beanfield, the civilians were brutally beaten: unarmed men, women, children and pregnant mothers alike. They were the Peace Convoy, and they were the rub in Maggie Thatcher’s unfolding narrative.
Ben Crispin’s passionate soliloquies in Beanfield retell this history through a narrative that follows the vibe before the festival to the occurrences of the day. It’s a simple plot: Steamer (Crispin) and his posh young lover Annie (Katie Villa) are on their way to the annual free festival. Annie is concerned about police presence at the site, while Steamer insists that he has no choice but to attend the gathering nevertheless: for him the event stands for the freedom of his lifestyle – living on the road. Annie’s private-school upbringing prevents her from understanding Steamer’s ideals, so when they meet Diane (Georgie Rennolds) en route to the gathering, Annie is less than impressed.
Dianne does not look like the average festival-goer, but she is also young and disillusioned with life, and excited about the prospect of briefly living life on the road- though perhaps not so keen on ‘free love’. Stereotypes like this are nicely and lightly challenged throughout the play; and they are often overcome. Steamer welcomes Dianne aboard ‘the van’ and she remains throughout the play as a reminder that the Stonehenge festival welcomed all people; not just the ‘hippy delinquents’ portrayed by Thatcher’s media at the time. The message innocent Dianne gives us is: this could have been you, and it’s a message that stays with us as we watch events unfold.
The set, designed by Phil Wyatt, is minimalist, but ingenious in conveying the atmosphere of the play, and the performers use the small space well. The live music provided by Ben Goldstone is surprisingly powerful at times in setting the mood for scenes, and commanding the audience’s attention.
An important contextual point in the play is portrayed by the Birmingham-based married couple (Rennolds again, and Ben Simpson) who demonstrate the way the media in the 80s shaped views of the Peace Convoy/hippies by juxtaposing news from The Guardian against the opinions of The Sun. Although their Brummie accents are not quite spot-on, the dialogue between the characters is fluid and the scenario of a married couple’s political differences is too familiar for the audience not to be drawn into it. Despite the chilling history of this story, we find humour and comfort in the play in scenes such as these.
Beanfield also reaches out to the literary-minded. It has an impressive Shakespearean edge rooted in the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it employs the language of the Bard at intervals, which gives the play a strangely ethereal feel – much as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It is a political play and a well-crafted one; reaching out to those who recall the Thatcher era, and those who don’t; it shares something with the festival-goers of our own time, people with an interest in UK history, or the law, and it speaks to those of us living ‘alternative’ or ‘unconventional’ lifestyles. If we had been around in the 80s, we would have been forced into the beanfield too.
For those who assume that what happened on the solstice that day was an unprecedented accident that got out of hand, or that it could never happen again, permit me to remind you that on June 5, 1986, Margaret Thatcher said that the British government was ‘only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys’. Beanfield retells and remembers the brutal truth of these words, which are just as relevant to today as they were under the Thatcher Government. Thatcher launched a tirade of assaults on civil liberties in the UK following the battle in the beanfield, in the form of the Public Order Act of 1986 and the Criminal Justice Act of 1994.
It is worth remembering too that the media dubbed the incident as the Battle of the Beanfield, which is how it is remembered to this day despite the fact that the various families, travellers, festival goers, activists and party goers attacked at Stonehenge that day were not able to fight back. They were a Peace Convoy, and a thorn in Maggie’s side, and they were unable to put up a fight. The word ‘battle’ implies and equal fight. ITN reporter Kim Sabido was with one of the few camera crews who witnessed ‘the battle’, and reported that: “The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed while holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted… There must surely be an enquiry after what has happened here today.”
There was no enquiry following the events that unfolded in the beanfield, and if the Earl of Cardigan hadn’t witnessed them, the truth may never have reached the public eye, as various news reporters had been chased offsite beforehand or could simply not gain entry.
This is a common occurrence with protest movements in our own time. I have witnessed similar horrors to what happened at Stonehenge in 1986 at recent climate camp gatherings. For example, riot police stormed the peaceful gathering at Kingsnorth in Kent in 2008. I saw unarmed, nonviolent people hit indiscriminately by police officers who had their badge numbers covered, there were thorough searches on entry to the site and upon leaving it, and harmless items such as soaps and toothbrushes were confiscated by officers.
Inside the camp, we felt terrorised and under constant attack. The police have, this week, begun to issue compensation to some of the people who were repeatedly searched at Kingsnorth, but this doesn’t remedy the fact that the peaceful camp, gathered in protest to climate change, saw the same kind of violence as the G20 march, but a lot less coverage and footage of it, as cameras and phones that attempted to record what was happening were promptly confiscated under section 44 of the Terrorism Act.
Back to Beanfield, I found the scenes featuring police to be constant highlights throughout the play, as they succeeded in capturing the darkly comic yet realistic nature of the tale; a hard act to balance on stage. Eli Thorne’s stage presence will not be easily forgotten: his speech before the attack shook me to the core.
However, if the truth of the tale is too much for the audience to take in, the play offers us a way out. At the close of Beanfield we are told not to take the story heart, if we want to, we can simply forget what we have seen, and wake up, as if it was all a dream.
As Bottom puts it: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
Personally though, as long as we still have the Criminal Justice Act, and as long as ‘hippy gatherings’ continue to be persecuted, I know I won’t forget a word.
• Beanfield is showing at The Bike Shed Theatre until June 19, and will appear at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol, from August 24 to September 4.
Read Natasza Kuler-von-der-Luhe’s Beanfield review on our Arts+Culture
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