Beans Means Love

With a name like this, it would have been foolish to believe the play would follow the norms. It didn’t. Basically a can of beans comes to life mysteriously to bring a couple together and that couple don’t even know each other’s names.  The other influencers are Commonsense, Caution, Impulsivity and Crystal Home and that covers the range of actions and emotions that we go through in life with some crystal thought to guide us. So the Beans Means Love was born from pain and suffering but ultimately the sense of humour we have. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. These two young local writers have produced an interestingly different product which had the audience absorbed, even if not always fully understanding.

With a cast of eight and a complicated thought line, it could have been improved to some degree with clarity of the various characters and their interaction. This may have been helped by having an independent director who was not also a writer of this challenging, complicated plot.  Several performers stood out, with Miriam Mohammed as Beans close to the top of the list. I have never bought a can of beans as good as she was.  Lara Hinton as Britney was very good as the centre of the forces of change.  She certainly had a very good clear delivery with a great range. Crystal Homie was a dominant character too as given to the audience by Callum Skoien … well done.  This was a strong cast that interplayed well but with some, a little more clarity and variation would have helped.

Over-all this was a challenging play both for the cast and the audience but it certainly kept us in the audience absorbed, even if lost a couple of times. We did follow the advice to laugh. It was a great effort by Sandgate Theatre to accept the challenge while giving new playwrights an opportunity to hone their skills.  When is the next play coming from these writers?

William Davies