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Brendan
is a likeable idiot savant with a tendency to expose himself, Lanny
may just be intelligent but is definitely an ignorant thug, and Patsy
is an aggressive 'baby borrower'. All are encountered by middle class
delinquent Jay on her first day at St Peter's, a 'pupil referral unit'
for disruptive schoolkids.
Richard
Davidson's play opens and closes in dreamlike sequences, but it is the
keenly-observed dialogue and realistic interaction between pupils and
teachers that give the play its edge. In fact, Jay is the least developed
character, perhaps because she serves mainly to bring the audience into
the situation, and then acts as a catalyst for the action. But again,
the action is of interest primarily because of what it tells us about
the other characters, including the teachers.
At the heart of Badnuff is the tension between commitment and
cynicism, but what really makes the play interesting is a synthesis
of the two, expressed in the idea that to be committed to teaching you
have to embrace your cynicism. English teacher Maggie is determined
to fiddle the system to get Lanny back into the mainstream despite his
repeated violent outbursts, while her boss Tom is torn between a pragmatic
complicity with her approach and a belief that out-of-control kids really
are better off in the unit. His exasperated ramblings about sterilising
'society's shit' obscure a deeper professional commitment, but one that
isn't easy to sustain under pressure.
A simmering affair between Maggie and Tom provides more than a diverting
subplot. It is both a snapshot of normal, respectable reality against
which to measure the behaviour of the kids, and a reminder that such
reality is neither as normal nor as respectable as we might think. 'You're
here because you're not normal,' Maggie tells the kids, and she is right.
It isn't normal to 'borrow' babies, to flash one's genitals or to beat
people up on a whim. But Brendan's riposte, 'How are you defining "normal"?',
is more powerful than he knows.
The reason a play about a pupil referral unit captures the zeitgeist
the way Badnuff does is that the issues of youth crime and behaviour
in schools take on an exaggerated importance in a society that is increasingly
unsure what it means to be normal. The play's title comes up in a discussion
about how in street slang, bad can mean good, but the kids acknowledge
that sometimes bad is just bad. (One definition of education might be
the ability to tell the difference.) In another telling scene, Lanny
recounts how he and his classmates used to torment a ridiculous teacher
who would try to speak 'their language'. Nobody respects an authority
figure who so cravenly courts approval.
For most of the play Maggie and Tom both manage just about to balance
relaxed, first-name relationships with the kids with their own roles
as authority figures, but it is increasingly uncertain what exactly
supports their authority outside the classroom. They mock the therapy-speak
that dominates in the world of behaviour management, but on a practical
level, they have nothing else to fall back on.
The cast does well to combine a sense of impending disaster with a more
subtle meditation on the themes of the play. The matinee performance
I saw was attended largely by schoolkids, who added a certain something
to the performance with their shocked gasps and howls of laughter -
the humour of the play is perhaps is best quality, and that rests on
its precision. Badnuff is a play about education, but more than
that, it that shows us why education is the theme of our times.
Till 17
April 2004.
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