Little Platoons

Steve Waters’s new play at the Bush is a real treat. It’s part of the Bush’s ‘School Season’ which has also featured John Donnelly’s The Knowledge. Both have been very well reviewed.

Rachel and Martin are splitting up because Martin’s met someone else. They are both concerned about their son, Sam, and how he is faring in the west London comprehensive where Rachel also teaches music. Martin thinks they might move him to an ex-grammar in Bicester. Rachel, though initially sceptical, becomes drawn into a group who are planning a Free School. Led by the charismatic rogue, Nick Orme and his wife Lara, the project appeals to Rachel when Nick outlines a school with music at its heart. She accepts the role of future head. A year later and the project is underway, about to receive state approval from the Coalition. But there are divisions within the team - is this a school with a traditional curriculum? Should it favour middle-class values? And when the team are to make a presentation to the relevant representative of the Department of Education, Martin appears and rails against the plan. The kids from Mandela they’ve brought in aren’t strictly on-message and Lara seems to have walked out on her husband. The school will go ahead but probably without Rachel.

Steve Waters writes, in the best sense, slightly old-fashioned plays. By which I mean, he writes plays that very squarely wear their issues on their sleeve. The Contingency Plan was unmistakeably about climate change; Fast Labour is undisputably about migrant labour in Britain; World Music is about third world aid and The Unthinkable skewers New Labour. Little Platoons is very precisely about the ‘free school’ movement and, insofar as a play can do, it debates the pros and cons of the scheme and even - very nostalgic, this - has a rallying speech towards the end, evidently expressing the author’s views:

I want us to get off our knees, I want to fight for what we fought form, our parents fought for, I want to defend every benefit and every extra year of school and every free place at uni and every bit of social housing and every park and public holiday, all of the things that almost made the world a little more just, all those things they say we can’t pay for, that we don’t deserve, all the things they tell us don’t belong to us - and this, all this is just a massive diversion from that - I want you to wake up (p. 84)

It’s unfashionably direct and the play is unfashionably specific about what it is discussing, but it is none the worse for that. (A rather more ‘editorial’ final speech has been - wisely I think - cut from this production.) Waters writes with enormous wit, warmth and elegance. The characters are plausible, rounded, rich and complicated; rarely do we feel - as we sometimes feel in other issue-based plays - that a character has been brought before us purely to exemplify a point. No character really exemplifies a single point here. The Free School movement, certainly in the first half, is given all the best arguments; it acknowledges the number of different idealisms that might come together to found a Free School. There are no saints and no demons in this play. Toby Young has apparently co-written an answer-play to this for the Bush; I’d be amazed if he can be more persuasive of the values of the Free School idea than Waters is before the interval.

And, of course, it’s fascinating. Like many people I suppose I’ve thought a bit about the policy, decided I don’t like it and not thought much more about it. It’s just very interesting to really go through the arguments and in such detail and with such an intelligent guide, always, of course, refracted through plausibly real lives and real dilemmas.

It’s very funny too. First, he creates a barnstorming role in Nick, which Andrew Woodall seizes with relish, swaggering around the stage with all the intelligent loucheness of Bill Nighy. He’s outrageous, idealistic, unreliable, brilliant and finally inept. And then there is Polly, charged by the Coalition to make the Free Schools happen. Hers is a brilliantly funny role; clipped, precise, efficient, relentlessly bright (‘We’re certainly mad keen on - grass roots’ p. 74). She’s also authoritative and powerful and Waters keeps us beautifully balanced between derision and awe. And there is a brilliant little exchange about the tiny niggles that conspire to destroy a happy relationship (pp. 69-70).

There are one or two moments where I’d have liked to see a different kind of finesse in the telling. The dramatist’s clumsy short-cut, the character wandering in through an inexplicably open door happens not once but twice (pp. 15, 68). I felt the puppeteer pulling Rachel’s strings once or twice: a dramaturgically convenient tearful breakdown (p. 22), a slightly over-neat plot pivot at the end of Act One, and I found it puzzling that she executed such a swift change of mood between her fury at commercial partnerships and then a sudden impassioned speech in favour of selectivity in admissions policy (in a lovely speech though, about how tired she was of saying ‘no’ and how she’d decided to say ‘yes’, which recalled Bradshaw’s similar speech in Howard Barker’s Victory). I did not wholly believe the way that she spoke to the kids towards the end - unless the idea was to suggest that she’s actually a rather poor communicator - though also I didn’t really find the kids that believable (would they really know who Michael Gove was and what he looked it? Would the excluded Brandon really know what Free Schools were for?).

But these are quibbles and largely occurred to me afterwards. It’s good for me who tends to bang on about metaphor and indirection and theatricality to see how enormously satisfying and enriching plays can be that consider a significant part of their role to educate and debate.