Education has not become any less vexed
a political issue since Tony Blair invoked it thrice as his main
priority in the 1997 election campaign. Any discussion on the subject
is almost guaranteed to generate more heat than light, and so I’m
afraid it proves to be with Steve Waters’ play for the Bush’s Schools
season. Last week I praised John Donnelly’s
The Knowledge,
with which this plays in repertoire, for avoiding the temptation to
become a state-of-the-system play. Alas, that is precisely what Waters
has written.
He takes as his
jumping-off point the current government’s nascent scheme of “free
schools” to be organised in and by communities and run independently of
local authority diktats. Rachel, a parent and teacher in a
not-quite-sink comprehensive in Shepherd’s Bush who is committed to the
comprehensive ethos of opportunity and enrichment for all, becomes
involved in a local free-school proposal and then agrees to become the
putative new school’s head teacher. We hear arguments in the school
lobby group, both as the initial application is made and then later
when it seems on the verge of approval and practicalities such as
acceptance/exclusion criteria must be sorted; arguments between Rachel
and her ex-partner over both the individual schooling options for their
11-year-old son and the general social principles underlying such
matters; arguments involving pupils from the existing school who are
brought in as a kind of focus group, and a platitudinous Department for
Education mini-mandarin (satsuma?) responsible for green-lighting the
enterprise.
In fact, all we hear are
arguments. Once or twice it threatens to become an actual play, but
soon enough settles back into its persistent mode of thinly-dramatised
argument and counter-argument. The domestic strife of Rachel, and of
another couple involved in the group, constitutes a fairly perfunctory
attempt to humanise or offer possible motivation for the… well, the
shouting. Andrew Woodall complements his cynical head-of-department in
Donnelly’s play with a verbose un-PC chairman of the free-school group
here, and Joanne Froggatt morphs from the committed but confused
protagonist of
The Knowledge
to Waters’ smiling, buzzword-spouting civil servant. But whatever one’s
position on the issue, this play leaves us none the wiser, nor even
better informed. It enacts our passion and our confusion: it says
everything and says it faithfully, and thus says nothing.
Written for the Financial
Times.