education education education (Wadrobe Ensemble/Trafalgar Studios, 10 June 2019)

Still haunted by the question of a friend in town for the Cumberbatch Hamlet: “does all London theatre have to do that dance thing?” They were referring to the tendency of productions to juxtapose naturalistic, or at least somewhat naturalistic, scenes of dialogue with more abstract dance bits—the characters twirl around, to represent angst or whatever. Used correctly, this kind of interrupted motion can convey lots of information, theme, mood—really anything.
 

Used badly, and you get whatever this was. A tribute of sorts to education at the cusp of the Blair years, and of course a sad Brexit coda, education education education played out as a kind of b-list My Country: A Work in Progress, from several years ago at the NT. Characters who Represent the Nation, As Well as Idiosyncratic Persons occupy space at a comprehensive school Somewhere in England. The audience of course hooted at the easy signifiers of nineties-ness and school-ness: Spice Girls! Sweatshirts with school crests! And the actors went through the expected motions: a violence, a shag, a rueful, a drink. (I’m not the first foreigner to remark on the English tendency to see the secondary school years as somehow the cradle of civilization.) There was even a visit from King Arthur, reflecting a general tendency to repeat every plot point or Significant Statement About the Nation at least twice, if not more. 

I didn’t like a lot of things about this—in particular, the scene transitions just didn’t work. In a repeated metaphor made flesh, the characters spun around as if underwater, while the narrator helpfully explained that this was because they were feeling overwhelmed. But maybe more significantly, this thing was just less out of the bubble it was trying to comment on than it thought it was. Narrated by a German stereotype of a visiting German teacher, the play wanted to make some sort of statement on England. But the England it was commenting on was a homogenous place, indeed. There were Germans in England, even in 1997; there were also ethnicities beyond, say, the list of echt-English names given during a roll call of students. And the long, lyrical account of the German Reichstag building, and the idea of politics it represented--legislators looking up at the people they served--suggested that any such political possibility could not be found in the country itself. Even when hymning European politics, the play could not imagine itself part of them. The shrug at a nationalism drowning in slightly shit mythology was, itself, a bit shit and lazily nationalistic—or at least blinkered, in what it imagined the nation to be. 

Odder still, if telling, was the play’s allocation of character attributes. The English teachers were easily recognizable types: the gym teacher who reads the Daily Mail, the passionate bearded language teacher, the bitchy would-be head teacher who is inevitably female. The play let men be passionate defenders of the inchoate truth, and women shrewish ball-breakers with temporarily lapses into random shagging. Finally, the only efficient technocrat was German: a stand-in for the chilly EU, I guess—but also a clear othering of anything that wasn’t typical, muddling-through, Englishness. I’m sure the play’s devisers think of themselves as staunch anti-Brexit types—but their assertion of the Englisness, the typicality, of England, “soggy” though the nation may be, they revealed themselves as more a piece with the Leave mindset than they seemed to believe. So this had its slightly crap cake and ate it too, in the process overwriting the genuine hope—and the actual, practical gains—of the Blair years. Its assertion of the naffness of King Arthur itself kept bringing him to the stage. If the monoculture keeps producing such dreary stories, maybe theatre-makers should start looking elsewhere for their inspirations.