Class

This review is from the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Irish writer-director duo Iseult Golden and David Horan get this year’s Traverse Fringe programme off to a charged start with ‘Class’, an ambitious school drama that at its best comes across like a grittier distant cousin to ‘The History Boys’.

Mr McCafferty (Will O’Connell) is a passionate primary school teacher, who we first meet making awkward chit-chat with Brian (Stephen Jones), nervy father to Jayden (played by Jones in other scenes), as the two of them wait for Brian’s estranged wife, Donna (Sarah Morris).

For the most part, ‘Class’ is an exercise in shifting power dynamics. At first, the erudite Mr McCafferty has the advantage, as the less well spoken parents nod meekly or blurt out confused questions as the teacher uses painstakingly judgement-neutral language to explain that Jayden has a learning difficulty.

But as what should be a routine chat wears on, fault lines emerge. There are the simmering tensions between Brian and Donna, still freshly separated. But increasingly the issue is Mr McCafferty: his temper starts to fray with the erratic Brian, who in turn accuses him of class condescension. Meanwhile, with somewhat improbable timing, the police choose that moment to show up and question the teacher about a cavalier intervention he recently made out of concern for another child.

There are great performances, especially from Jones as the angry but sensitive Brian. But the play becomes increasingly unwieldy as it reaches boiling point. The climax of the parent-teacher meeting is, to put it mildly, a bit improbable. But my biggest problem was that I came away confused as to what ‘Class’ was trying to say about Mr McCafferty. The scenes in which we see him teaching Jayden and another girl, Kaylie (Morris again) in a special afterschool group seem entirely valedictory, and the question of whether he is a snob seems largely irrelevant by the end – despite the heavy hint in the title that this is something the play is probing.

In the end, Mc McCafferty mostly comes across as an impulsive maverick with unconventional methods that get results – far from dissecting or subverting the trope figure of the inspirational teacher, ‘Class’ ends up enshrining it.