Then and Now

As part of our Artcity programme this year, Dan Thompson is working with B arts on a history of the company from our beginnings to the present day. The company was founded in 1985 and in this post Dan invites us to reflect on the context in which the company was founded. - Susan Clarke

Author - Dan Thompson, Thursday 8 April 2021

There are a string of parallels between 1985 and today. Conservative ministers were attacking the BBC for bias, the Westland Affair raised questions about the Conservative government and the integrity of senior politicians, and police brutality and institutional racism fuelled riots across England. 

The government was at war with schoolteachers, who went on strike. The government responded with restrictions on future strikes and by imposing a national curriculum a few years later.

A militarised police force was more literally beating down protestors in industrial areas, as the year-long miners’ strike came to an end and steelworkers continued to strike. 

Race was a major issue: the positive was that Bernie Grant became the UK’s first black council leader.

But in September race riots broke out in Handsworth, Birmingham. In Brixton, Dorothy "Cherry" Groce was shot and paralysed for life by police looking for her son, leading to riots there. And in October Cythnia Jarrett, a 49-year-old black woman, died during a police search of her house, leading to riots in Tottenham. 

Despite claiming to be the party of economic stability, under the Conservatives unemployment had risen to more than 3 million people, and poverty was on the rise. Fewer than 5% of the black population who left school that summer had found employment.

HIV - a virus that causes AIDS - had been identified a year earlier. In July, Hollywood actor Rock Hudson became the first star to admit to having AIDS, and he died in October. By the end of the year, there were more than 20,000 reported cases of AIDS, in every region of the world. It was a disease that few understood.

But the rich were getting richer, driven by the property market and deregulation of the city. The Sultan of Brunei bought London’s iconic Dorchester Hotel and Mohammed Al Fayed bought Harrods. In the policy unit of 10 Downing Street, David Willets warned the Prime Minister that the financial deregulation they were planning could lead to boom and bust and would be  “labelled the unacceptable face of unpopular capitalism”.

Against that backdrop, the radical edge of the arts born of the late-1960s was reaching stability and a certain maturity.

While theatre had been seen as a comfortably middle class, suburban activity, companies like Actors Touring Company, Brighton Combination, and Black Theatre Collective had set out to shake things up.

The abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship - until 1968, he had to approve every script - opened the gates for them. They built on earlier work by people like Joan Littlewood, who founded the Workers’ Theatre Movement, and whose work inspired the E15 theatre school. But these new companies worked in many different ways. 

Theatre In Education (TIE) came out of Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre in 1965, and took workshops into schools, getting children to act out moments from history. 

Starting with The Jolly Potters (about the history of the Potteries) in 1964, Peter Cheeseman built a new style of musical theatre that used verbatim transcripts of conversations with real people. By 1985, over 280 productions had been staged - and the company were getting ready to open their new, purpose-built New Vic Theatre the following year.

Two years earlier, Pam Schweitzer and Age Exchange had taken Cheeseman’s techniques and created Reminiscence Theatre, collecting stories from older people. 

Founded in 1968 by John Fox, Sue Gill, Roger Coleman and others, Welfare State International (WSI) created huge community spectacles, with lanterns, live music, fire and pyrotechnics. WSI was a multidisciplinary collective of engineers, musicians, sculptors, performers, poets and pyrotechnicians bought together by shared values and philosophy, and they toured across the UK and internationally. In 1983, the company published Engineers Of The Imagination: The Welfare State Handbook - a sign of their growing confidence and maturity.

And in 1985, a new company would be born in the spirit of Welfare State, with the New Vic’s commitment to place and people, and fired by the wider political background. 

Gill Gill, Hilary Hughes, and Yvon Male had spent years touring together with Ritual And Tribal Theatre, one of the radical, experimental theatre companies born out of the The University of Keele Theatre Company. 

In 1985, sparked by the process of theatre making which often centred the ‘genius male director’ and sidelined women, the trio decided to form a new company. On a blasted heath just outside Kippen in Scotland, they made a commitment to a non-hierarchical company, led by women, which would make collaborative theatre with people who might not ordinarily encounter the arts. The model they chose mirrored the way the wider women’s liberation movements operated, but was (and still is) untypical for a theatre company.

They quickly recruited a fourth member, actor Susan Clarke, and Beavers Arts (later abbreviated to B Arts) started a journey that hasn’t yet ended. The four were stilt-walking, fire-eating, bicycle riding street performers but together they would make touring shows for schools and playschemes. They would work with local communities to create community celebrations, and would train and work alongside Welfare State. They would create international partnerships starting in Italy in 1989; then in Romania, Bosnia, Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Tunisia and New Zealand. 

At home in Stoke, they would make an ongoing programme of site specific theatre based on the social history of the city. And following their international work, in Stoke they would work with dispersed asylum seekers sent to Staffordshire.

What they will make next is, as ever, in the hands of the company members and the communities they work with. 

But what’s certain is that, just as in 1985, the company know it’s impossible to make work that ignores the social and political landscape of the time. And for a company formed in the political turmoil of the mid-1980s, the early-2020s look like a very familiar landscape. 

Dan Thompson

We would love to hear from you! What are your B arts memories?

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