Debates whether education should be driven by inspiration or examination and also explores the narrow line between the pedagogue and the pederast in schools. (Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)
TIM LOTT:
It failed for me. The first half, I thought, was a disaster. It really relied very much on a kind of very slap dash approach to making a play, in which it involved a lot of speeches and quotations. It was almost like Alan Bennett was scribbling down his thoughts for our delectation. Interestingly, there is a quotation from Dorothy L Sayers. She says, "I always have a quotation in there, it saves original thinking" and that's a very odd quotation to put in there considering that a good proportion of the play is made up of quotations. You can just imagine Bennett thinking, "I just want to get across what I have to say," but with a good play meaning seeps out between the lines, and it doesn't do that.
MARK LAWSON:
It's addressing big questions, what is a teacher and what is a paedophile. Does he find interesting answers to those?
GERMAINE GREER:
I am not sure that answers are a playwright's business, but certainly the presentation of conflict is a playwright's business. I want to say something in defence of the approach of the whole quotation approach, apart from the fact that it's my education and I still do believe that you can't understand poetry but you can have it in a way if you can remember it, and you understand how to apply it and in what circumstances it might work. I quite like the things that Hector says. When he says, "They say I am good with words. It sounds as if I am good at Welsh."
MARK LAWSON:
Hector is the teacher played by Richard Griffiths.
GERMAINE GREER:
And it's certainly true that there is an erotic core in that relationship which doesn't mean it has to be genital or physical. I found that he was approaching one of the sort of central conundrums of his own existence, that he was doing it in a characteristically oblique and rather furtive kind of way and it also was coaxing the audience to think there are worse things than paedophilia. All paedophiles are not rapists let alone murderers. The wonderful joke about boys' vulnerability, "Do you think this will turn me into Proust?"!
MARK LAWSON:
Michael, what struck me is that it's difficult often to know where we are, because a lot of the film references are 30s, 40s, 50s music we have. We then have reference to a Lord of the Rings posters which is set in the 80s. There is reference to league tables, more 90s than 80s. It seemed confused?
MICHAEL GOVE:
I thoroughly enjoyed the play but he is trying to pack a lot in. He is archiving elements from his own past. His own experience as a 1950s grammar school boy, essentially hatred of the Philistinism of the 1980s and aesthetic revulsion of the way he sees learning popularised by figures like Simon Sharma and turned essentially into entertainment. In that respect, the one character who bears the brunt of his dislike, a figure who starts out as a teacher, becomes a television historian and ends up as a Blairite spin doctor, this character is made to do too much work. But nevertheless, Bennett, I think, is still a brilliant writer. I am afraid, unlike Tim, I love plays which are full of rhetoric and quotations. I am probably one of the few people still alive who loves George Bernard Shaw, and Bennett is writing in that tradition. The other thing is that the young actors who play these precociously intelligent boys are uniformly good and two of them are brilliant.
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