The Beanfield

Breach Theatre

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783197330
• eBook ISBN: 9781783197347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

One of the hits of Edinburgh 2015, The Beanfield is the boldy political first show from Warwick University graduates Breach Theatre. 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield – a brutal police crackdown on the annual Stonehenge Free Festival. Called away from policing the miners' strike to uphold a new injunction around the Stones, officers took the tactics of Orgreave to a field in Wiltshire – battering and injuring new age travellers, making mass-arrests and destroying their mobile homes. Performance makers Breach, and Guardian award-winning video artist Dorothy Allen-Pickard present a multimedia show set between the 1985 and 2015 summer solstice celebrations, reflecting on state violence, civic freedom and cultural heritage.

Re-enactment

Wiltshire

[Mirie It Is – Bishi]

Mirie it is while sumer y-last / With What this nicht is long / And ich with

fugheles son / Oc nu neheth windes blast / And weder strong / Ei, ei! wel michel wrong / Soregh and murne and fast

Ellice:	Hi
Andy:	That [costume] is really worrying – I’ve just been looking over the photos
Tom:	Hello
Dorothy:	It’s alright, they’re not real police, they’re all students. Shall we go? OK, do you want to jump in there?

Andy:	Is that the Beanfield?
Dorothy:	We guess. Because this field must be – I think the one the other side of it is the Beanfield …
Andy:	What’s this road we’re on then?
Dorothy:	We’re on the B343 I think … and then in parallel is the A303
Andy:	I’m starting to wonder about the accuracy of this map

The van pulls into the car park of the

Hotel. Dorothy gets out and walks across to try and jump the fence into an adjacent field. A man runs out of the building and chases her.

Ellice:	Oh fuck
Grace:	Does someone want to go and give her a little bit of backup?
Billy:	Yeah, but don’t go in the police wear
Grace:	He’s running!
Tom:	Yeah right, Andy and someone who’s not dressed as a policeman?
Billy:	Yeah

Andy:	He’s saying it’s not here
Grace:	It is here. He’s lying

Dorothy gets back into the van.

Dorothy:	So he came over to me, and he said, ‘what are you doing? You’re on private property, get off’ – tried to just kick me off. And I said, ‘I’m just trying to work out where certain fields are.’ And he went, ‘that’s not the Beanfield.’ And then we started talking about it and he was like, ‘you’re trespassing, this is private property, off you go.’ And I said, ‘is there any way you could help me to find the Beanfield?’And he said, ‘it’s a very sore subject for everyone who lives around here’
Anna:	He said ‘there are raw rounds’
Dorothy:	‘There are raw wounds, get o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Foreword – Andy Worthington
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the Text
• Cruel Summer – Bananarama
• Solar – Cosmo Sheldrake
• Nick Davies
• Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera
• Carol Damaged
• Nottingham Medieval Re-enactment Society
• Landowner
• Re-enactment