The Bricks of Burston

My last visit to Upstairs at The Western for their Spring Season was to see The Bricks of Burston. Ostensibly chronicling 'the longest strike in history' which was staged not by miners but by minors, this is in fact a love story of two principled teachers, Tom and Kitty Higdon, and their struggle to improve the educational lot of the children of Norfolk. Their struggle with an schooling system which was mired in old methods and beholden to the local landowners and clergy culminates in the local parents and children rearing up in their support for better studying conditions and full time education.
Unusually for Upstairs at The Western this is a three handed production which, at times, makes for a crowded stage. However, that very confinement works to the advantage of the story by highlighting the claustrophobic working of small communities where everybody knows everybody else and their business.
Tiny village schools still proliferated in rural communities and married couples often took on the responsibility of educating the local children. However the close relationship between the landowners and the clergy combined to 'keep the working classes in their place' by ensuring they got only the legal minimum of education.
Alex Helm's portrayal of the controlling, vindictive and bitchy clergyman Reverend Eland represents the landowners' and Rector's concerted bullying of the Hidsons in an effort to evict them from the school when they started teaching the children that there was more to life than toiling on the land. When Tom Hidson managed to get voted onto the Parish Council their venom was intensified and the teachers were sacked on trumped up charges of child abuse. Rather than desert their charges the Hidsons set up school on the village green and thence in a disused carpenter's shop. When the lease of that building came to an end a campaign by the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers Union to publicise the plight of the educators resulted in funding being donated from all over the world to set up the Burston Strike School.
Georgia Robson as Kitty and Tom Grace as Tom Higdon have a good chemistry onstage as the married couple struggling to improve the lot of their pupils.
My only small niggles with the production concern the script. Every now and again a modern vernacular creeps in and spoils the otherwise accurate portrayal of early 20th century rural life. My other gripe is that despite the production being trumpeted as being about 'the longest strike in history' it is almost discarded as incidental right at the end.
The Bricks of Burston is on again at Upstairs at The Western on Thursday 3rd April

First published in Western Gazette 
© Paul Towers 2/4/2014