Review: SCHOOL PLAY, Southwark Playhouse

If all the world's a stage, it's only because inner city primary schools weren't around in 1599. As headteacher, you're an autocratic leader, an inclusive manager, a surrogate parent (to kids and staff) and, if you get a moment to breathe, a human being too, while the world's problems, big and small, swirl around outside your office, the still centre of a furious whirlpool.

Such is the lot of Jo, competent, wise, but fearful of what her school (the possessive pronoun is always the right one for headteachers) may become, as central government diktats open the door to external "sponsors" and SAT results, the hard currency of a headteacher's negotiating position, arrive in the post. She is assisted by her secretary Lara, efficient and committed, with the respect and love for Jo that comes from once being her pupil, but with ambitions to become a teacher herself.

Meanwhile, agency tutor Tom has an eye for Lara and but none for the mechanics of teaching to a curriculum and the all-important need for improving SAT scores. Armed with the self-confidence of Winchester and Oxford and the overweening sense of entitlement that comes with it, his academic knowledge is filtered through an improverished emotional intelligence that, at 21, has barely reached the embryonic stage.

Then a pupil collapses at a school trip to the Natural History Museum.

Ann Ogbomo catches the deep breaths and compartmentalising that headteachers use to get through the day, the week, the year while never failing to show that Jo cares about her pupils and her school. There's no element of the caricature here and, drawing on my experience of being a governor of a South London primary school just like hers, it's a wholly convincing portrayal.

Fola Evans-Akingbola's Lara veers between commitment to her boss, Jo, and to her own nascent, stalled career as a teacher. She's conscientious and extols the importance of professionalism, but is not above sneaking a look at confidential papers, surprisingly stored in an unlocked drawer in an open office. (The set, designed by Anna Reid, is beautifully observed, stuffed with the detail of school life.) Lara's contradictory actions and attitudes do not always add up.

Oliver Dench is on a bit of a hiding to nothing as Tom, the posh boy slumming it in the streets. He starts as a lad about town and is genuinely funny, but soon the script gives him too many cliches to spout and director Charlie Parham, in an otherwise assured production, has him stand still observing matters when he would surely have realised that his place was outside a private office (where he would probably have listened at the door). Rarely for a male character, Tom is underwritten and underused.

This is Alex MacKeith's playwriting debut and there are times when it shows. The second half descends into a rant / polemic that should be shown (and largely was in the first half) rather than soapboxed out to us at some length. The conflicts fizzle out rather than resolve with Jo and Tom walking away from their problems and Lara walking towards her dream. The play's ambition isn't quite matched by its reach.

That said, it's tough to judge school stuff on stage as one's memory is inevitably filled with the likes of Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Barrie Keeffe, leftish theatrical royalty. Schools have changed much since they wrote about them in the 70s and 80s and they're ripe for treatment again - I'm just not sure that School Play ticks all the boxes.

School Play continues at Southwark Playhouse until 25 February.

Photo Guy Bell