Can we – should we – control the future? That’s the dilemma faced by anxious parents attempting to steer their offspring through a labyrinthine school system, educational think-tanks, and the teachers shaping young lives. Tamsin Oglesby’s play is an intriguing opener for the Matthew Warchus era: impassioned, fiercely topical, and – with its relatively youthful cast – kicking against the “old” in “Old Vic”. That, and electric guitars as rousing musical accompaniment. The school of rock is now in session.
With 23 actors and myriad thorny issues to service, Oglesby necessarily favours breadth over depth, but Warchus’s propulsive production sweetens the hasty homilies. The opening montage of ministerial speeches reaffirms the politicisation of education (appropriate, then, that Ed Miliband should be in the audience). But Oglesby – herself a parent tortured by the Kafkaesque system – is equally astute at teasing out the tribal prejudices shaping this discussion. No one can remain objective when it’s bound to our own choices and experiences.
Malala Yousafzai-like Pakistani refugee Alia (a strong stage debut from Nikki Patel, pictured right), previously denied education because of both gender and class, lauds the life-altering empowerment of meritocratic learning – in contrast to her apathetic British peers. It’s less rosy at the school gates, where parents gather to cast judgement upon one another’s gaming of the system, whether hiring tutors or making their child play an “endangered species” instrument like the euphonium. Guardian-reading Hettie (Lucy Briggs-Owen) contorts hilariously to defend her decision to go private, one devious couple fakes separation to cheat the postcode lottery, and liberal Suzy (Natalie Klamar), advocate for the troubled local school, must reconcile principle with self-interested parenting.
Meanwhile, a panel responding to Britain’s falling international standing deliberates options: more discipline or freedom; better meals or higher teacher pay; tweaks to the elitist status quo or radical new quotas and positive discrimination. At the coal face is Rob Brydon’s unflappable state school teacher, preaching independent thought and handily spelling out personal bias to an imaginary class – the latter an odd choice, given that the cast pops up in school uniform. Infamous bad boy Jordan thus remains an unseen case study.
Many of Oglesby’s characters suffer a similar fate, more debating points than people – and broad, if witty, takes at that. Brydon and Patel keep the saintly Mr Crane and Alia palatable, and there’s dynamic support from frenemy mums Briggs-Owen, Klamar and Sukh Ojla, Joshua McGuire and Brian Vernel’s warring ex-Etonian and charity chief, Ben Lloyd-Hughes’s dispassionate psychologist, and Louis Martin’s binge-eating statistician.
The notion of adults behaving like children is overemphasised, with both a playground brawl and food fight. Farce is played up to counter the inescapable didacticism. Still, if it speaks more to the head than heart, Oglesby’s piece revitalises both familiar issues and a familiar theatre. We may be “up the creek” as far as education is concerned, but at the Old Vic, the future’s bright.