It felt like I was back at school when I took a seat in the auditorium at The Grove Theatre last night for Teechers, John Godber’s anarchic comedy about the staff and students at a local “inadequate” comp.
The familiar dialogue took me right back to my schools days. The same phrases, threats and taunts have been echoing around school corridors, along with the whiff of overcooked cabbage, for years. Only the names of the kids change.
Godber, a former drama teacher, no doubt borrowed a little from his past and drew on his own experiences to write a play about, well, a year in the life of a virgin drama teacher.
Mr Nixon was fresh out of teacher training and still wearing his rose-tinted glasses when he was thrown into the hell that was Whitewall Comprehensive and the clutches of Salty, the formidable Hobby and her sidekick Gail.
What made Teechers go to the top of the class is that the story was told through a play performed by the three kids who take on 20 roles of both teachers and students.
Jacob Addley, Donna Preston and Nicole Black swapped identities in the blink of an eye to bring us life in an inner-city comprehensive. There was the school bully Oggy, the terrifying maths teacher Bashford, the imposing head Mrs Parry and a range of generally failing kids and resigned teachers just happy to make it through to the end of the day.
Preston’s outsized Hobby was every teacher’s nightmare. She’s seriously scary, intimidating, petulant and rebellious who regularly slumps her considerable frame over chairs and desks in a protest against the new man in class. Black was in her prime as the sexually rampant PE teacher while Addley’s naive and idealistic Nixon actually shared a lot of Salty’s dreams and aspirations.
The laughs don’t stop until we inevitably get to the one serious, and tired old speech about a parents right to choose schools and their kids right to be afforded a fair and decent education.
I’d give the play and hard-working cast an A- for presentation. They really threw themselves into it, effortlessly blending character changes with bursts of music and dancing, it but I’d like to have seen some semblance of set.
The audience seemed to consist of a large number of teachers and a few groups of teenagers who laughed out loud as they recognised themselves among the stock characters. There were a lot of in-jokes.
The story says a lot about standards in schools and the aspirations of both staff and pupils but I was laughing too much to take much notice. A demerit for me then.