School Play

Alex MacKeith

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786821232
• eBook ISBN: 9781786821249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Britisches Drama

The headteacher's office of a south London primary school is always busy. But today is results day and the phone won't stop ringing. Jo, the headteacher of St. Barnabas, knows that the arrival of the school's SATs results puts her job on the line. With the future of the school and its pupils at stake, Jo struggles to maintain order as her staff and superiors demand answers. Can she protect her students and herself? A sharp, wry and timely drama. Set against the backdrop of an education system in turmoil, Alex MacKeith's debut play asks what it means to be a primary school teacher in contemporary Britain.

Act 1

July, 2017.

The double office in a primary school in South West London, partitioned by a thin wall.

The inner portion of the room belongs to the headteacher. On a desk, among the detritus of a busy office, is a bloods kit for diabetes. There is a huge revolving whiteboard filled with information: the nerve centre of the school.

The ante-office is that of the administrative assistant. There is a desk, a sofa, two small classroom chairs, a low table with a kettle, a box of teabags, instant coffee and four mugs. Large filing cabinets dot the room. Behind the desk hangs a smaller whiteboard filled with appointments. A door gives onto the corridor.

Fluorescent strip lights hang in the office and the corridor outside. We get the impression that this is an arena of controlled chaos.

Silence. A clock hanging on the wall reads 7.30am. The door is closed. The fluorescents light up. One of them flickers sporadically, then resumes a steady glow.

Footsteps along the outer corridor approach. A couple of soft exhalations, the sound of struggling with a trivial but difficult task. The door handle moves slowly down once, then flicks back up. A shuffling. The door handle moves down again, flicks back again.

LARA: (Softly.) Fuck it.

More shuffling, the hollow clink of tin on stone. The door swings slowly open. Behind it LARA Hudson, the headteacher’s administrative assistant, is crouching to pick up a can of Diet Coke off the floor, groping as if she can’t quite see it. She is mid-twenties, tired as hell, and hungover. She carries a handbag, a lever-arch file and a stack of post. She picks up the can and walks behind the desk. Behind her, through the door, a large Year 2 display is partially visible.

LARA dumps the arch file down onto her desk, throws the post on top of it, letting the handbag slip from her arm. Opening one drawer after another she rifles around the desk until she finds a pair of glasses and puts them on with relief, a minor exhalation of ‘yes’, blinking and adjusting her eyes to lenses which aren’t quite her prescription any more. She grabs a silver packet of Ibuprofen from an open drawer and drinks two tablets with the coke.

She checks the clock, looks for a place to set her drink, settling on a position just in front of the keyboard. She boots up the computer, which makes the Windows welcome noise.

LARA: (Turning to the post.) Ok…

She begins to look through the post, throwing some letters into her box, setting others aside. She hums to herself. She reaches the penultimate letter, a brown A4 envelope, and pauses over it. She checks the date.

She turns back to the post, sets the other letter in her own box and begins to open the brown envelope with a finger, working feverishly, checking the corridor. She stops, takes the second pile and the envelope, walks into the larger office, places them in the postbox on the desk. As she turns away she remembers something, consults her phone and goes to the whiteboard. She changes the time on a note: ‘L.A. Meeting: 10am’ becomes ‘L.A. Meeting: 11.30am.’ Spotting the Natural History Museum notice on the whiteboard, she doodles a dinosaur, complete with feathers, below it.

As she turns she eyes the envelope again, grapples with temptation, and decides to open it. She grabs a letter opener on the desk, sets about her task, and stops again, throwing the letter in its box and setting the opener back in frustration. She returns to the smaller office, turns the kettle on, settles back to her own desk, opens up the lever arch files, withdraws an A4 sheet from a plastic wallet along with a pile of cheques and permission slips, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Characters
• Note
• Act 1
• Act 2
• Act 3