A ONE-PERSON play is coming to the Halliwell Jones Stadium in Warrington this Wednesday and Thursday at 7pm, when “John Bevan, Team Player, From Lions to League” is performed by Scott Gutteridge at the Platinum Suite.
The play received its world premiere in South Wales last week with four performances, starting in Monmouth, which is where Bevan finished his career, as a successful rugby union coach in Monmouth School.
The play is split into two distinct parts, the first section concentrates on the early part of Bevan’s life, his rugby union career, and going on the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand in 1971, where the tourists beat the All Blacks two tests to one, to win a Lions rugby union tour series in New Zealand for the first and only time.
The second half focuses on his unrest in rugby union, his signing for Warrington, and the early part of his career there, with a big focus on the 1974 Challenge Cup Final, when Warrington beat Featherstone Rovers 24-9 in front of nearly 80,000 fans at Wembley Stadium. That led to Bevan being selected for the Great Britain Lions tour that same year.
Gutteridge, a 26-year-old Welsh actor who graduated from RADA six years ago, performs the humorous production, and with a mixture of lighting and sound effects, this one-person play about Bevan, who went on to play 332 times for Warrington, once for Lancashire, 17 times for Wales (including four times as captain), and 19 times for Great Britain, which included six senior internationals, is intended to captivate audiences.
The writer Mari Lloyd will attend both performances at the Halliwell Jones Stadium alongside Bevan, who is now 75 years old, and there will be a question-and-answer session following each performance.
Lloyd said: “We’ve covered in the play from the Lions tour to his first season at Warrington, and because he was very young when he went on the Lions tour, he was only 20, it’s almost like a coming-of-age story.
“We go through why he went north, and in Wales at the time it was for financial security, and the big decisions he and his wife had to make.
“And the question then was, would he be a success, would he be happy or had he just thrown away a life in rugby?”
Tickets, priced £10 for adults and £5 concessions, can be booked at https://register.enthuse.com/ps/event/JohnBevanTeamPlayer.
Full interviews with Mari Lloyd, John Bevan and Scott Gutteridge will be in the next issue of Rugby League World.