Charlotte Marshall talks to John Donnelly and Steve Waters about their plays for the Bush theatre which examine one of the most pertinent topics of the day.
No one could ever accuse the Bush theatre of being behind the times. After the success of Steve Waters’s dramatic climate change play The Contingency Plan in 2009, the creative team sat Waters down and asked him to write a play about the new government. All before a general election had even been called.
You can’t help but think however, that once the coalition had been formed, playwrights around the country must have been rubbing their hands together in glee – well at least in between those moments of funding cut induced anxiety attacks – with political inspiration pushing its way onto their writing blocks. Ex-teacher Waters chose to take David Cameron’s ‘big society’ vision as inspiration for his Bush commission and Little Platoons is the result, a comedic look at free schools and what they mean for society. When John Donnelly’s play about newly qualified teachers and the problems they face landed in the Bush’s lap, the Schools Season was born.
Sharing cast members and performing in rep alongside one another, Little Platoons and Donnelly’s The Knowledge both explore very different modern aspects of an institution that seems to fascinate Britain more than any other. With an abundance of TV programmes about schools – in which Donnelly points out “Kids are either angels or knife-wielding mini gangsters” – plays on the subject are less common. When pushed, most people will probably quote The History Boys as the stage authority on education, which as Donnelly points out is “a brilliant play, but it’s nothing to do with any school I know anything about.” The Bush season attempts to address the real issues that are facing parents, children and the government today, avoiding sentiment and clichés.
“We haven’t had a second to contemplate the meaning of these things, they’ve just been rammed down our throats”
With one of the first and most high profile free schools set to open in West London this year under the leadership of journalist Toby Young, the Shepherd’s Bush venue is a fitting setting for Waters’s Little Platoons. The playwright’s fascination with free schools came from both his 10 year experience as a state school teacher and his self-declared status as a middle-class parent, “I’ve had a lot to do with education in my life and I really found myself provoked by the idea of the free schools. I went to a conference in March and I was genuinely shocked about this community of interest which I knew nothing about. It just seemed like such a fascinating question to examine: ‘What does it actually mean? What does it reveal? Is it actually what it says on the tin or is it somewhat more sinister, does it hide something else?”
Heading into the subject with a level of suspicion, Waters wrote Little Platoons after a period of research which included meeting with Young himself: “When you’re writing a play you speak to people that you don’t necessarily on paper agree with but you find them immensely persuasive. Toby Young is one of them. He met with us and I found what he had to say very hard to argue with in that situation and I wanted to make sure that view of the world was in the play, because it’s quite a compelling view of the world and it’s also quite funny.”
Waters’s scepticism found its way to the page through his lead character Rachel, who is also both a teacher and a parent: “She finds herself reluctantly drawn into this committee of parents who are planning their own school in Shepherd’s Bush. We watch her very sceptically getting drawn into this project as the only educationalist in the room and through that we see the arguments that inform it and the very complex feelings that people have about education.”
Donnelly’s play The Knowledge similarly centres on people’s relationship with state education, this time from the point of view of NQT Zoe, who, receiving little support from the school, is left to impart her own, still developing, wisdom on a group of difficult children: “One of the main questions in the play is can you actually teach people about life? Why do we expect teachers to be role models and be people that the kids look up to morally? Is it not enough that they can impart thinking skills to them, why do we expect them to be decent citizens as well?”
“I think plays function best as provocations and I think that’s the role of drama”
Of course, as Donnelly recognises, many people become teachers through a desire to help young people and play a part in their personal growth at an age that particularly interests Donnelly: “Four of the characters in the play are 15. I think there’s something about that age that, for me looking back. You’re about to leave secondary education, it’s a time when your sense of yourself is being sharpened, it feels a little bit like the clock is running out in terms of the freedom you have to develop your thinking as a person.” But for Zoe, she goes into teaching with none of this idealism: “I was quite keen to avoid that, but she does have a sense of idealism that she can be a good teacher and wants to be, but she doesn’t go in expecting Robin Williams and everyone standing on the tables! She doesn’t have fantasies about herself being the person who can transform their lives.”
For both Donnelly and Waters, bureaucracy and the mountains of paperwork caused by ever-evolving educational policy – a much reported aspect of education – was at the forefront of their minds. Although Donnelly wisely points out that criticising the government is not always the most exciting route to go down – “It’s quite an easy bandwagon to jump on, where actually how to run schools effectively is very difficult and very tricky and it’s something parents are hugely concerned with, so I don’t want to demonise the government by saying it’s an easy job” – he also believes “the current policy seems massively incoherent.” For Waters, David Cameron’s educational manifesto is at the very centre of his play: “It [Little Platoons] changes during the second half as we look in detail of what that [free schools] might mean in practice and in a way it becomes a play about the big society, about the coalition’s call to get out there and do it themselves. Frankly, in some respects, there’s something quite exciting about that notion but in practice I suspect it has rather more sinister overtones.”
Both playwrights are insistent that while they are tackling subjects that are very much in the public eye, their job is to present a story, not inform, as Donnelly explains: “I think plays function best as provocations and I think that’s the role of drama – provocations and asking questions – rather than offering a didactic, reasoned debate. You can’t have a debate in plays.” Waters agrees, commenting: “I’ve never liked the notion of getting a message across because it’s never as simple as that… It’s not like reading a New Statesmen article, it should be a fun night.”
While they may be wary of audiences making decisions based on their stories, they both agree that theatre is the correct medium to bring these issues to light: “I think it’s absolutely crucial and essential that theatre and all art forms address current issues and issues in the media a lot, like education, like budget cuts to the arts and all public services,” said Donnelly. “The arts are incredibly useful to voice concerns and voice fears.” For Waters, “It’s more about the courage to say ‘deal with it’ and the theatre is a place you can do this.” As the playwright explains, while he doesn’t want to offer any solutions, plays can offer a pause for thought: “I certainly don’t want to stop free schools in their tracks but I do think it’s like a lot of things that are coming from this government, we haven’t had a second to contemplate the meaning of these things, they’ve just been rammed down our throats at high speed and it’s time to think.”
“Why do we expect teachers to be role models and be people that the kids look up to morally?”
So what then inspired both playwrights to tackle the subject of education? Firstly, says Waters, it’s because a school is a place where different generations meet, providing a snapshot of the world we are creating for the future: “It’s an image of how they feel about society really, so slagging off teachers, grumbling in the playground and feeling disgruntled is probably because they’re [society] feeling generally disgruntled.” For Donnelly, the attraction of a school was to place an intellectual discussion away from the untouchable upper-middle classes of Oxbridge and “a drawing room in Hampstead” and place it instead in the hands of teenagers and teachers: “There’s a thing about wanting to have a play about the nature of knowledge, an existentialist play about who we are, but not having a discussion on a high level.”
The Knowledge also draws upon an idea that the season’s leading lady Joanne Froggatt must be well versed in, having recently been propelled into the spotlight in the acclaimed TV series Downton Abbey: “I think one of the other things that’s quite useful about a school is it’s an environment where the behaviour is quite codified,” says Donnelly, “so in the same way in which a costume drama or a period piece drama is a really useful starting point for drama, you have a really quite defined relationship between upstairs and downstairs, you get a sense of that in a school as well.” When everyone is expected to behave in a certain way but people choose not to, the results can have disastrous effects, much to a play’s dramatic benefit, as The Knowledge shows.
The subject of schools has one clear unique selling point; with just a few exceptions, we have all experienced the educational system in one way or another and everyone, it seems, holds their own opinions on the subject. While audiences must be left to form their own conclusions, Waters claims one thing is not up for debate: “In Britain, more than anywhere else in the world, it is the defining issue, because of class, because of our history, and nobody can pretend that it’s going in the right direction at the moment.”
CM