BEATS Comes to the Kings Head Theatre in April

Beats comes to the King’s Head Theatre next month. Performances will run Thu 18 - Sat 27 April.

This is it. This is all there is. That’s your lot really. Which is just as well. Because nobody can arrest your imagination.

In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act effectively outlawed all raves… 

Returning to the brand new King’s Head Theatre after a sell-out performance in February, Ned Campbell stars in and directs this London remount of award-winning Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley’s Beats.

Johnno McCreadie is a teenager living in a small, suburban working class  Scottish town. Tonight, with his best mate Spanner, he’s going to his first illegal rave. Maybe his last, if the Criminal Justice Act has anything to do with it.  Conflicted Policeman Robert Dunlop  is on his way to break things up, as he reflects on his own troubled past in a town left devastated by the closing of the mines and the steel mills. 

Beats is a pulsating and magnetic celebration of rebellion and resistance;  centred on the power of gathered youth, and the power of protest - something each generation must discover for themselves. 30 years after the Criminal Justice Act, protest and the lasting effects of Tory government on our working class towns is still all too relevant.

In a tour de force performance, Ned Campbell effortlessly populates a world of characters. Tom Snell underlines it all with a constant, pulsing soundtrack - reminding us that we too are gathering to music ‘’wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. 

Ned Campbell’s Beats was first performed to sell out audiences at The Rosemary Branch Theatre in 2023, before transferring to another sell-out performance at the new Kings Head Theatre in February 2024.  Coming back due to popular demand for this two week run, Ned Campbell builds on an already impressive CV in his early career with roles in films such as Guy Ritchie’s star-studded ‘The Gentlemen’.

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