Birmingham's Big Brum Theatre group praised by crititcs in Palestine
Alison Jones talks to a Birmingham theatre group performing through the barricades.
Reviews are part of a theatre company’s life. Sometimes welcomed, occasionally feared, but a useful gauge of how their hard work is being received.
For Big Brum Theatre in Education Company the words written by a group of students after they had seen a production of A Window by Edward Bond, were more affecting than an enthusiastic response from professional critics.
After spending a day watching the play and working with the cast, pupils at Galil High School in Nazareth put together a poster in praise of their experience.
A comment by Tsaniem Khateb “it opened lots of doors in my mind, it makes me think in another way, in a deeper way, it opened my eyes deep inside” are typical of how the play and their contact with Big Brum has touched them.
“We create work that is complex and challenging,” says artistic director Chris Cooper. “There is no message in it. The children don’t have to get something. There is not an issue to be resolved. It is what the children find within themselves that resonates.”
The reason Big Brum was performing in Palestine earlier this month is a credit to the reputation that the company, based at Pegasus Primary School in Castle Vale, enjoys both in this country and abroad. The company tours throughout the West Midlands to schools and colleges, working with pupils from the age of three up to 17.
“The type of work we do at Theatre in Education and the way we work with children is a quite unique British model,” says Dan Brown, the general manager.
“We had a link to an organisation called the Qattan Foundation, a cultural foundation based in Palestine. One of their directors studied in Birmingham about ten years ago and took a PhD at Birmingham City University. He was still in contact with professors and academics and through that he came to know of us and our work.
“It was a long term goal of his to get us out to Palestine as demonstration of this British model. There was nothing like that out there. Another thing was it was a play by Edward Bond and he really wanted to get a Bond play out there. He thought it could be of enormous benefit to the children.”
A Window had been written especially for Big Brum by its patron. The controversial playwright works mainly abroad, his difficult and uncompromising reputation having estranged him from the majority of this country’s major theatre companies – the exception being Big Brum.
This new piece, which Big Brum staged at The Rep last October, is a three-part play about a dysfunctional family that sees a mother-to-be struggling with pregnancy and an abusive partner. She hangs herself when her son is a teenager after he is injured going out to buy her drugs. Finally the boy confronts the father seeking bloody retribution.
“The play is a triptych,” explains Chris. “It is a classic Greek drama though set in a contemporary situation. It is very Oedipal in the final panel when the son sets out to blind the father.
“That had a very specific resonance in Palestinian society because of the whole question of familial relations and intergenerational conflicts.
“Palestine is still a rural culture that was propelled into this technologically-governed conflict.
