Bruiser Theatre Company’s propulsive take on John Godber’s Teechers at Belfast’s The Mac can’t be faulted for sheer energy. Even if its breakneck speed feels like it is being played with the fast-forward button perpetually held down.
Either that, or, with a playing time clocking in at 70 minutes, it has been cut closer to the bone than is needed. This is director Lisa May’s third take on Godber’s ever-popular pupil-centred portrait of life in comprehensive schools, having first staged it in 1998.
Revived as recently as 2022, Nuala McGowan returns here to reprise her role as Hobby (one that May herself also played in the earlier production), joined by Mary McGurk’s Gail and Chris Robinson’s Salty.
Godber’s gloss on his own experience teaching drama—less Forty Years On, more Please Sir!—was an anarchically caustic commentary on the comprehensive education model, poor second-cousin to grammar schools, when Hull Truck premièred it at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival.
If Teechers’ core complaints remain as relevant now as then—the political environment just as, if not more, divisive—wider social and cultural developments since threaten to expose the play’s doubly-antique blending of agitprop provocation and front-cloth comedy. Something Godber recognised in his Teechers Leavers ’22 updating for Hull Truck’s 50th anniversary in 2022.
May has also attempted to update, albeit references to 1999’s The Matrix and television celebrity singing competition The Masked Singer, first seen in 2020, conspicuously jar with one to the 2016 Euro football final. Other anachronisms similarly dilute and blur what semblance of specificity there is in this transposing to “somewhere in Northern Ireland”. Even so, Godber’s Yorkshire attitude and accent remains indelibly, distractingly, discernible. A conundrum that McGowan, McGurk and Robinson—especially good as the conflicted drama teacher—approach with admirable if never altogether persuasive vivacity.
In a cash-strapped funding environment, its appeal to schools audiences (several performances during the run are dedicated to that constituency) and youth groups (conspicuous on the opening night), perhaps May’s adrenalised, concertinaed concision is understandable. But it results in a confusing, headlong rush where energy is poor compensation for the lack of clarity.
Played at full throttle throughout and lacking sufficient air and space to breathe, it presents her actors with a circle they struggle, valiantly, to square.