Dates announced for play about International Brigades

The IBMT-commissioned play about the International Brigades, ‘Dare Devil Rides to Jarama’, will be premiered on 24 September in Bedford at the start of a tour around theatres in Britain that will run until 3 December. 

Dates for this autumn leg of the tour have now been announced (see poster below). A second leg of tour dates will commence early in 2017. 

“Dare Devil Rides to Jarama” is centred on the contrasting lives of International Brigaders Clem Beckett and Christopher Caudwell. Beckett was a Lancashire blacksmith and famous star of the speedway track, while Caudwell was a renowned writer, poet and Marxist philosopher.

They were killed together at Jarama, having befriended each other as members of the British Battalion's machine-gun company.

Written by Neil Gore and produced by Townsend Productions, ‘Dare Devil Rides to Jarama’ will be performed during the 80th anniversaries of the formation of the International Brigades in October 1936 and the Battle of Jarama in February 1937. 

This was the battle that saw the British Battalion go into action for the first time and paid a heavy price in lives lost while it helped prevent a fascist offensive from surrounding Madrid.

Louise Townsend of Townsend Productions says the play will shed light on the political and social world of the 1930s and all that inspired and confronted the Brigaders on their journeys to Spain.

She adds: ‘The play will commemorate and celebrate the contribution and sacrifice of the volunteer International Brigades from all over the world, including 2,500 from Britain and Ireland who recognised that the defence of Spanish democracy against fascism was their fight too

“It will capture the raw passions and emotions produced by the Spanish Civil War – idealism to despair, hope to anger, determination to fear – through powerful storytelling, stirring song and poetry, and compelling movement and dance.”