Little Platoons, Bush Theatre

The second in this venue’s Schools mini-season is a flawed state-of-the-nation play

by Aleks SierzMonday, 24 January 2011

Changing society: Claire Price as Rachel in ‘Little Platoons’Geraint Lewis

The second play in this venue’s ambitious Schools mini-season is the first drama to tackle the currently contentious subject of Free Schools. While the earlier play, John Donnelly’s The Knowledge, was a powerful account of how a young teacher is blooded in her encounters with a group of unruly kids, the second, by Steve Waters, focuses more on parents, and shows how a fortysomething teacher, Rachel, joins a group of middle-class west Londoners in order to set up a Free School.

The Free School activists are presented as hard-working but eccentric, fractious and ultimately unable to agree among themselves

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