Mark Beeson

Mark Beeson (1954-2022) read classics before moving into human sciences, working as a primate ecologist alongside a parallel career as a playwright. In 1979 he spent six months surveying local attitudes to archaeological sites in and around Widecombe-in-the-Moor. That fieldwork became his first play, The Badgers (1980), rehearsed on the natural granite stage of Easdon Tor and performed for invited audiences in a barn and a private theatre at Poundsgate.

Further plays followed, including The Hedge, written for Ann Jellicoe's 1982 Village Community Play Competition, and The Swallows, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In January 1989 Beeson formally registered the Manaton and East Dartmoor Theatre, known as MED Theatre, as a charity, the first theatre organisation dedicated to Dartmoor. He served as its Artistic Director for over three decades, writing more than fifty community plays and experimental dance dramas before his death in February 2022.

Beeson's other strand of work was primatology: in 1981 he studied blue monkeys on Malawi's Zomba Plateau under primatologist Vernon Reynolds, earning an MPhil in primate ecology from the University of Exeter in 1986, work he later wrote up as the verse novel The Blue Monkeys of Zomba Plateau, read on BBC Radio 3. According to Exeter's archive of his papers, the family structures he observed in the monkeys helped shape his approach to community theatre, though the archive itself makes no larger psychological claim beyond noting the connection. He also founded The Dart, an independent magazine covering environmental issues, disarmament, local trades and community life, which ran from 1981 to 2001.

Photograph by Chris Chapman, 2017, via MED Theatre.