Programme
Alan Bennett's most commercially successful comedy play is set in the world of public-school-boys during the era when post A-level students would spend their next school term cramming for the all-important 'Oxbridge' exams which would come around just before christmas. It was a system that has now been abolished, largely because many felt it discriminated against the poorer and/or less 'fashionable' schools. In Bennett's play, CGS (Cutler's Grammar School) is one of those less fashionable schools in an unfashionable area, Sheffield, and has a poor record in it's previous years Oxbridge examination entries, particularly amongst it's history students. The headmaster is determined to improve that record to improve his school's standing in the national league tables, something he appears to care more about than the actual quality of education. Speaking of Hector, for example, his long standing English master, he does not doubt the quality of his teaching but bemoans that his methods are unquantifiable. To this end, he engages Mr Irwin, a young historian, not much older than his students, a visionary who beleives that the key to academic success lies in singularity of approach, and that a distinct and different viewpoint is the key to exam success. The eight pupils represent an almost equally eclectic cross-section of humanity, taking in a jewish homosexual, an intellectually-challenged sporstman, a born-again christian, and a sex addict who is having an affair with the headmaster's secretary!
Through this strange mix of characters, the play is an alternative investigation of the obsucre (for most of us) society of the English boys minor public school. In that examination, it is sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, often poking fun, but never ridiculing - Irwin, in fact, would have been proud if one of his students had written it and so, oddly would Hector. The headmaster, on the other hand, would probably have died from apoplexy. The action ranges from the thought-provoking to the downright farcical, and there are a number of bitter-sweet moments also that give it a poignant edge - such as Posner's unrequited homosexual longing for Dakin, and the discovery of Hector's extra curricular misdemeanours giving the Headmaster the ammunition he desires to use against him.
The set on which all of this action takes place consists of a large flat stage with a built-in turnable, which slowly revolves to present the action from different angles. Chairs and desks are brought on and moved around between scenes, and backdrops descend from above of school rooms and corridors that appear to have been sketched on graph-paper. Lively recorded music is used to cover these short interruptions and the drama itself has a scattering of musical moments thrown in for good measure.
Gerard Murphy is in fine form as Hector, often leading the way in the comedy stakes as he banters with his students and playfully beats them with their exercise books - when he is not fondling their private parts on the back of his motorcycle. His singular approach to teaching "General Studies" involves teaching his students songs by George Formby and Gracie Fields, a challenge in which they act out movie endings for him to identify, and a riotous farce, conducted entirely in French, where he encourages them to act out a lascivious scene in a Bordello. All this is his attempt to encourage development through perception and reasoning rather than text-book learning through the mere accumulation of facts - indeed he blanches whenever his students quote facts back at him. He wants to turn out rounded individuals, not just repositories of knowledge. His students are old enough to make his sexual infractions with them, if not to be condoned, at least fall short of paedophilia, and allow us to sympathise with this amiable character when he is ultimately disgraced.
Ben Lambert's Irwin is contradictorily dualistic - the cynical idealist who reduces the teaching of history to a slick exercise in examination technique. As the league-table-obsessed headmaster, Thomas Wheatley strikes just the right balance of humourless dead-pan for the rest to feed off. Among the students James Byng provides some good musical moments with his singing and adds pathos to the proceedings through his unrequited love affair with Dakin and his searchingly pertinent self-assessment - "I'm a Jew, I'm small, I'm homosexual and I live in Sheffield - - - I'm f**ked!" The scene in which he reads to the disgraced Hector from Thomas Hardy's harrowing poem, "Drummer Hodge," is particularly moving.
All in all, this is part coming of age drama, part inditement on the enduring values of Thatcherism (during which era it is set) and part revolt against the spin-driven culture of today. It is not the funniest play you are ever likely to see, but it is well-rounded and has some achingly funny moments and some terrific one-liners.
A funny, dramatic and at times pointedly acerbic exercise in subjunctive history - a slightly raw, occasionally maudlin, but mostly romantic revision of times gone by.
Don Gillan - www.stagebeauty.net
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