Three 16-year-old students celebrate the end of their school days and give thanks for the one teacher who offered them hope and gave them a passion for theatre. John Godber’s
Teechers is fertile ground for Bruiser Theatre Company which has a
long and illustrious history of producing multi-roled, face-paced physical theatre with striped back staging. A scarf, a false nose, a couple of chairs, a row of tall lockers and some smaller ones that can be moved around are all the three cast members really need to bounce between characters and locations.
Teechers gets off to a roaring start as the three eejits bounce onto the stage. Neither Gail, Hobby nor Salty – played by Nuala McGovern, Mary McGurk and Chris Robinson – seem to be pupils likely to sit still in any lesson. The arrival of naïve and idealistic Mr Nixon as a new drama teacher slowly opens their eyes to new possibilities. Ultimately, the three students tell the story of his first year in school in an end-of-year play they stage on their final day in Whitewall High School.
For an hour, there is no let-up in the frantic pace. Scene transitions are like a race with the cast repeatedly moving props and performing a choreographed action as if the director might walk out at any time, blow a whistle and send one off the stage for being late. That they only start to sweat after 50 minutes suggests that rehearsals have engendered a high degree of fitness! The final 10 minutes is given a little more space to breath as the pupils sum up their admiration for Mr Nixon and their despair as he counts the cost of teaching at Whitewall and contemplates finding a hole in the fence to escape through.
The script requires that some of the characters – particularly Mr Basford the deputy head who is played with glasses and a false nose – bounce between different actors throughout the play. The fact that this becomes seamless is testament to how the cast have been drilled by director Lisa May. The staging might be minimal, but it has some lovely surprises, particularly the way it transforms to represent the nearby St Pius grammar school.
Originally set in the mid-1980s, aspects of the dialogue and some cultural references have been updated. There’s a great rant about all ability education that cements the central theme of class within the education system that sadly hasn’t aged at all. A group of what could only have been teachers at my performance roared with laughter at some of the situations, seemingly recognising staff-on-staff agitation, the veneration of the timetable, the cantankerous caretaker, and familiar pupil misbehaviour. However, I wonder whether today’s school children will notice the absence of the all-pervasive mobile phone and social media from the scenes that deal with bullying?
Ultimately Teechers rejoices that good teachers can get under the skin of any pupil and spur them on to go beyond the stagnant scholastic curriculum and embrace their creativity and talents. Teachers can value children and change their life direction, offering opportunities that may even compensate for a system that deems to label some pupils as failures. Yet pupils and teachers are cruelly trapped in the same system.
Bruiser’s Teechers is in The MAC until Saturday 10 February before touring through Dundalk (Wednesday 14), Armagh (Thursday 15), Newtownabbey (Tuesday 20), Omagh (Wednesday 21), Lisburn (Friday 23), Downpatrick (Saturday 24) and Derry (Sunday 25).
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