Lighthouse Poole
Review by Edna Hobbs
I can certainly recommend Teechers as a good night out – almost a panto for adults! In a theatre full of school drama groups and old teachers, the opening of the play worked a treat: three noisy kids in uniform throwing paper planes, shouting and running about got everyone’s attention. ‘I think this is part of the show,’ said the man in front of us nervously to his outraged wife after a few minutes of mayhem.
The basic scenario is a story told backwards: three school leavers, Hobby, Salty and Gail, put on a play for their inspiring drama teacher, telling the tale of his year at their comprehensive school and his influence on their lives. For such a shriekingly funny play the storyline is strangely – and disconcertingly – unredemptive. The teacher, Mr Harrison, named Mr Nixon in their play, doesn’t change his mind about leaving as they beg him to do and does have a ‘heavenly’ time at the private school that takes all their best students, while the trio paying tribute to him take on dead-end jobs and make do with memories.
Actually, despite some insightful lines, like: ‘a friendly-youth-worker type of tone…’ describing the eager to please teacher; ‘I stood there with mood on…’ for the stroppy teenager; ‘they treat the less able kids like rhubarb: keep them in the dark and shit on them’ to describe the system and great visual moments like the giant time-table and the pink cover slips, not to mention the endearing Simon Patterson drowning in his anorak, the actors James Dryden, Laura Bryars and Frances Wood outshone the play.
John Godber wrote this in 1984 and it feels like it: if you expect something relevant you’ll be lost. The play claims it ‘puts the education system under the microscope and examines the themes and issues that are still relevant today,’ but it doesn’t. OFSTED isn’t mentioned, the pressure of constant testing isn’t even alluded to, teachers being merely delivery mechanisms of government policy rather than independent professionals, students being merely units of A-C grades, all non-existent… the issue of comprehensive schools being glorifies zoos just isn’t live anymore, thank teachers! So the big serious speeches are rather awkwardly empty – ‘all kids deserve the right to be developed to their full potential’ is no longer disputed.
So the play could certainly have done with updating. Not so the late‘70s/ early 80’s music. By the second half the audience, who had been offering Hobby and Gail sweets as they wandered down the isles, where clapping and singing along to all the old hits played at the school Christmas party.
They left the theatre on a high of shared suffering and affection for the things we all love to hate, like ‘books sellotaped together’ and caretakers who claim, ‘I’m only trying to do my job’ when they stop you doing yours. It was nostalgia for the crotchety old characters that used to inhabit schools that made the play a good night out. As Ms Whitham says to Mr Nixon, ‘If you see a hole in the fence, go through it’: only we were peering into the past for our escape.