Written by Kirsty
Budding
Directed by Cate
Clelland
Free Rain Theatre
Courtyard Studio,
Canberra Theatre Centre
Review by Len Power
25 October 2015
In ‘The Art Of Teaching Nothing’, the teaching profession
comes in for some heavy satire. In an Australian high school, every teacher is
incompetent, conniving, corrupt, sexually predatory or displaying a host of
behavioural problems that would make the students seem more adult! A new teacher arrives and seems decent, down
to earth and idealistic. We observe her trying to survive in this crazy place
but she has her own problems, too, keeping secret the fact that she’s dyslexic
and trying to teach English.
It’s meant to be a satire and characters and situations are
exaggerated as you would expect. This
would be fine but what is presented isn’t grounded in reality and that makes it
all uninvolving. A lengthy interrogation
scene is totally over the top and unbelievable. In addition, the real relationships are
damaged by contrived revelations towards the end of the play.
The actors generally do rather well with the material they
have to work with. There are good
performances from Rob De Fries as the Principal, Brendan Kelly as Paul, the art
teacher, Glynis Stokes as the idealistic new teacher and Liz Bradley as Mary,
the elderly Maths teacher who can’t handle computers. Emma Wood, Marti Ibrahim and Arran McKenna
either had unplayable cartoon caricatures to deal with in the script or just
played them that way. Whichever it was,
it didn’t work and I would have expected the director to sort that out.
The set, designed by the director, Cate Clelland, is very
wide, making actors hard to hear at times and they were often forced to make awkward
moves around the staff room table with the limited space available. In addition, one unlucky patron sitting at a
table close to the stage was sprayed with liquid from an actor’s mouth.
The play is far too long and could easily lose two or three
characters and their subplots. The
author, Kirsty Budding, does have a flair for comic writing and some of her
one-liners are quite droll. There is
some good writing here, especially at the beginning but the last half of the
second act needs some serious re-consideration.
By the end of the show it had ceased to be funny and it was
impossible to care about the message or the characters.
Len Power’s reviews can
also be heard on Artsound FM 92.7’s ‘Artcetera’ program at 9.00am on Saturdays.
