Beryl Burton

image: Raph Achache
 

Can you tell us about the plot of the play?
It’s the story of Beryl Burton – an extraordinary female cyclist from Yorkshire. She was at the top of her game between the fifties and eighties, and was famous abroad, but got little press coverage in this country. She worked on a rhubarb farm, as well as being a mother and housewife, but while being this ordinary woman, she was so extraordinary in what she actually achieved. The play celebrates her accomplishments, but also explores what it was that drove her to put her body under such stress and strain for essentially thirty years. She was Best British All-Rounder for 25 years in a row – the training involved in that is extraordinary. It really is an incredible feat.

There are four actors on bikes. We make it very clear that we are in the room with the audience and that we’re going to discover Beryl’s story together. It’s a very make-do-and-mend piece in the spirit of Beryl and her husband, Charlie, who was also her bike maintenance chap. Their approach was like that because she didn’t want to turn professional – if she’d have done that, she would have had to specialise, and she wanted to compete in all events, so she stayed as an amateur. That meant she didn’t have any kind of funding; she had to pay to enter events, to get there, and all sorts. The play really takes on that spirit, their spirit. It champions it.

Had you heard of Beryl Burton before you took on the directing job?
No. I come from a long line of Yorkshire women, but I can’t say cycling was something I was into, so it was a journey of discovery for me too. The audience will be a mixture of cycling experts, people who know about Beryl, and theatregoers who know about Maxine Peake. I couldn’t take anything for granted for those people who didn’t know anything about cycling, so had to state the different races, as well as demystify the technical terms used in cycling. It’s presenting in a really physical and fun way that hopefully helps people to know what we’re on about.

Beryl started as a radio play, didn’t it?
Yes. After being given Beryl’s autobiography by her partner, Maxine read it and thought, “Why haven’t I heard of this woman before?”, so she wrote the radio play. Before the Tour de France in Leeds, James Brining, the artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, decided he ought to have a cycling play on. He knew about the radio play, and asked Maxine to write it for stage. I came on board and we had a week in a rehearsal room, workshopping a draft of the play. It was very different from the radio play. We spent a week with four actors, who enabled her to produce the next draft. It took us by surprise how successful it was.

We knew it was a lovely piece, good fun and very moving, but we didn’t know it would capture the audience’s imagination so much. We sold out in Leeds and had to extend the run, and they’ve brought it back this year after the Arts Council asked West Yorkshire to tour it. It’s fantastic that a female story has packed houses. The film Suffragette is out, and I think people are ready for female stories. We want to re-examine what women of the past achieved, because a lot has been forgotten.

 

Especially different types of women’s stories. We don’t have much of a highlight on sporting women…
No, we don’t. And part of the tragedy about Beryl’s story was – I mean, it didn’t overly bother her, because she got some recognition and an MBE – she wasn’t allowed to enter the Olympics because women’s cycling wasn’t considered to be camera-worthy. For some reason, she was never able to compete in the Tour de France. She is the only female who has taken a world record from the men – it isn’t common parlance and it should be. We are now trying to uncover these stories about our great ancestral women – just because we don’t know about it, doesn’t mean what they did wasn’t amazing.

There are multimedia aspects to the performance too…
In the radio play they had some verbatim interview recordings, but not in the theatrical show. We have some footage, but because we’ve got a representation of Beryl on stage, we didn’t want the audience to spend the play comparing the real Beryl to our actor. We’ve got some film, but they’re mostly evocative photographs, or film that goes behind the cycling sections of the play.

Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to her daughter, Denise, and Charlie about Beryl throughout the rehearsal process. They’ve come to see every incarnation of the play so far, which has been fantastic. The reason Maxine was able to write it because she’d spent a lot of time researching the story and talking to Beryl and Charlie when she was writing the radio play. I think she was so taken with the characters.

How did you bring the biking part to life?
I love the challenge of doing something really difficult. We spent a lot of time researching what we could do with the bikes – I wanted the actors to actually cycle. It takes you to a different level as a performer because your body is exhausted and you become almost vulnerable. There’s something about watching people put in effort, cycling and getting sweaty from working hard on stage.

We found fixed rollers that people use at home to train, and designed our own contraption with them so the bikes could move. I try to keep the staging moving so the bikes are never in one place for too long. There are lots of surprising theatrical devices we use in order to get the most out of the bikes – four on fixed rollers and one freewheeling.

The actors are being put through the ringer, then?
It’s tightly choreographed. There’s not much time for them to rest – in between putting different hats on and being different characters, they’re cycling a lot. They became quite fit during the rehearsals, and I imagine they’re getting even fitter on the road. Sam, who plays Beryl, cycles something like 10km each show – she has a milometer on her bike, and she was clocking up hundreds of kilometres during rehearsals. We can’t stage a twelve-hour race, but you need to get a sense of the effort involved.

What’s your favourite anecdote about Beryl?
Probably the twelve-hour race when she passed Mike McNamara and gave him a sweet. Not that she necessarily felt sorry for him, but she knew he would feel so bad when she passed him. She had to have that little moment of camaraderie with him. Just the fact that she did that, and held that record. As far as we know, she still holds that record today. Every time I see that point in the play, tears come to my eyes.

Beryl is on at Nottingham Playhouse until Wednesday 18 November.

Nottingham Playhouse website