‘Yasmin’s obsession with making up her face was a desperate attempt to divert attention from her breasts,’ PAGE 24
THEATRE Free fall
The Knowledge/ Little Platoons BUSH THEATRE, LONDON
hen the idea for Grange Hill was pitched to the BBC in 1978, some exec- utives questioned whether children would really rush home from school to watch a show largely set during the kind of lessons they had just left. But Phil Redmond’s comprehensive- set series ran for 30 years and the appeal of the educational drama is confirmed by the fact that Waterloo Road, a sort of peak-time descendant of Grange Hill, has just won the Best Drama prize at the National Television Awards. The double bill – perhaps that should be double lesson – of plays about the state of learning in Britain that are currently running at the Bush Theatre in west London would be familiar to graduates of the Grange Hill/ Waterloo Road viewing school but with the caveat that these pieces belong to an unusual sub-genre of classroom drama that is unsuit- able for most children. Both set in and around London schools, The Knowledge by John Donnelly and Little Platoons by Steve Waters – performed by largely the same set of actors on alternating evenings – are aimed essentially at parents; especially any who may be thinking of signing up for Michael Gove’s free schools initiative, the subject of the latter play. Little Platoons begins, in a clever and telling
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dramatic strategy, not in the classroom but in the living room, with estranged parents fighting over their children’s education. As they divide their bookshelves – the first volume we see is, pointedly, Will Hutton’s The State We’re In–bearded Guardian-reading London leftie Martin (Richard Henders) reveals to his impending ex-wife Rachel (Claire Price) that he plans to move their son Sam (Otto Farrant) to Bicester Grammar, close to the Chilterns love nest with his new partner. Rachel, who is perhaps a little conveniently a teacher, retaliates by signing up with local liberal parents who are establishing a free school in an empty shopping centre. The strong suggestion that the educational beliefs of both parents are defined by personal convenience is typical of Waters’ general sense of disapproval of his characters. The chair of the opt-out project, Nick (Andrew Woodall), is a wine-bore public schoolboy who has failed to achieve the income or inheritance to give his children the education from which he benefited and so, the clear implication is, hopes to create a state-paid, white middle-
The Knowledge, one of paired productions at the Bush. Photo: Geraint Lewis
class academy away from the multicultural troublemakers who have hobbled his kids in the rat race. That probably is the motivation of some free-schoolers but the tone of the play keeps veering uneasily between social analysis and satire, especially with the entries of Polly (Joanne Froggatt), a posh, brittle, jargon- fluent official from the Department of Education. Little Platoons is funny and punchy but there never seems any risk, as there is in the best political plays of David Hare and David Edgar, of the best lines being given to the other side. The drama frequently feels like a didactic illustration of a proposition, which is dramatically appropriate but the- matically weakening.
One of the pleasures for those seeing both
plays is that some of the doubling actors are playing starkly contradictory characters. For
RADIO Voices in the night
My Dear Children of the Whole World BBC RADIO 4
about the ethics of putting fictive words into the mouths of real, though absent, people. Who is the novelist, one side of the argument runs, to rush blindly into a landscape where even a professional historian sometimes fears to tread? And, having rushed, shouldn’t he (or she) be exceedingly careful when the char- acter beneath the lens is only lately dead? The recent TV dramatisation of William
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Boyd’s Any Human Heart, for example, had a high old time attributing questionable motives to the Duke of Windsor, with the result that a whole tribe of impressionable television watchers will go around believing that this account of what the Duke said, and did, in wartime Bermuda is the literal truth.
ver in the world of historical fiction, there is a modest little controversy going on
example, in The Knowledge, both Froggatt and Woodall are on the other side of the edu- cational divide: at the cramped and choking educational coalface as, respectively, a rookie teacher and battered long-term head at a London sink school. The subliminal effect of seeing these paired roles is to reflect on how long the theories of parents and educational theorists on educa- tional methods would survive exposure to a modern non-selective school and one of the aims of the playwright, an ex-teacher, is to show just what staff can endure during an average lesson. Zoe, the new recruit, is vari- ously threatened, ignored and sexually harassed by the reluctantly present pupils who are more interested in erotic exploration of each other than of the syllabus. But then – in a joke already done over several series in Channel 4’s Teachers –the priorities are often little different in the staffroom. Zoe makes a miscalculation while trying to help a troubled student, leading to scenes that intriguingly explore the compromises necessary to keep a disadvantaged school run- ning. Both plays are effectively state-of- England lessons and the Bush deserves high marks for enterprise and presentation, although the project would have been stronger if either Waters or Donnelly had placed centre stage one of the disaffected students in, per- haps, a modern version of Barrie Keefe’s terrifying Gotcha, set in a 1970s London comprehensive. Mark Lawson
If novelists sometimes have a qualm or two about these interventions, no such nervous- ness ever seems to cramp the style of the radio dramatist. Certainly Hugh Costello’s absorbing take (29 January) on Pope Pius XII’s agonis- ings over Hitler’s assault on the Jews took a positive pride in summoning up the shades of half a dozen real people from early 1940s Rome, loading the most affecting confidences and resonant epigrams on to their lips and send- ing them whirling around the Holy See like carousel horses. This is not to question the sin- cerity of the piece, or the relative sobriety of the treatment – one can only imagine the hor- rors that would have been inflicted on it by TV – merely to say that anyone who had known Pope Pius (who died in 1958) could have been forgiven for raising an eyebrow or two. We began down in the vault, His Holiness bent on solitary prayer amid the tombs of his predecessors, yet alternately harassed by his worried understrapper, Cardinal Maglione, and faithful housekeeper Mother Pasqualina, who if she couldn’t persuade her employer absolutely to don the newly knitted cashmere pullover was at any rate determined to see it (Continued on page 24.)
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