The Prime of Ms David Hoyle. Photo: Holly Revell
There’s always been something of the classroom about the theatre, and something of the theatre about the classroom.
Each, after all, is a congregation of bodies, a group of people gathered in a given place to be addressed by speakers professing some kind of expertise, informed about subjects of interest and, one hopes, nudged into consideration of their wider applications. The event has gone well if those gathered have been fruitfully engaged and stimulated – though the specific measures of success might vary from belly laughs to league tables.
The overlap between pedagogy and performance dates from antiquity. In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the role of didaskalos emerged in Athens. Broadly corresponding to the job of teacher, it was a position with considerable influence over matters of social and political significance and contention. Notably, the same word, didaskolos, was used for the equivalent of director in Athenian theatre. This primarily recognised the function of teaching actors how to perform the script but it also pointed to the broader role of drama as a source of public commentary and guidance. The Greek classroom, meanwhile, was a site for training in rhetoric – the use of persuasively composed and performed speeches to sway the hearts and minds of an audience, in a mix of education and pedagogy.
That, of course, was a long time ago. Christian Europe has seldom been as willing to make space at the very heart of public life for theatrical expression and dialectical investigation. And for the past couple of centuries, in our culture at least, education and entertainment have made strange and rare bedfellows. The pedagogical structures that still dominate most of our schools and universities have remained conservative, individualistic and competitive. They focus on transmitting specific information to be measured in exam results and held accountable to sometimes arbitrary targets or economic outcomes. As for theatre, it remains dominated by fourth-wall realism; its more conservative practitioners upkeep the fixed and reproducible scripts, sets and performances that can leave little agency for members of the audience, allowing them to engage in quiet, internal reflection but little else.
Even within such confines, the modern classroom’s potential as a site of drama has found expression on the modern stage – though such drama is often presented as being conspicuously at odds with expected modes of teaching. Both Jay Presson Allen’s adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, for instance,
have fun with teacher characters who are also transgressive, charismatic performers who prove revelatory in their effect on their charges, but are at the same time troubled or compromised in their personal characters (the abuses of charisma are part of these stories’ subject too).
Yet while such works tantalise with a refreshing vision of the classroom as a stage, in themselves they remain wedded to a theatrical model that limits the ability of the performance event to function as a forum for educational exchange. The didacticism of the naturalist production corresponds in some ways to the didacticism of the conventional classroom; there is indeed a strong relationship between the politics of the classroom, the space in which it unfolds and the interpersonal relations facilitated or forestalled by its arrangement. There are few opportunities to talk back – let alone to turn the tables and educate the educator, to the benefit of all.
This is where cabaret comes in. The word cabaret means room. It could be a bar with a stage, or a theatre, or indeed a classroom – the point is the gathering of people in a space and the unique encounter that results when they exchange not just energy but also words, actions, feelings. The cabaret space is closer than the proscenium-arch theatre to a more empathetic, progressive learning environment in which the teacher facilitates rather than dominates, leads the conversation rather than remains the only voice heard. The physicality of the space is important too: the lighting set-ups that allow for eye contact between performers and audience, the ability of the acts to walk among and touch the punters, the cultivation of a sense of dialogue, not monologue. So, what if one tried to use the best aspects of the cabaret form to point towards a better vision of education?
That is what we have tried to do – in an absurd, tongue-in-cheek but ultimately sincere way – with The Prime of Ms David Hoyle, a forthcoming production themed around education that I have directed and produced for Chelsea Theatre. As the title suggests, the production is a riff on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but with a crucial difference or two. Our esteemed educator is David Hoyle, the sensational post-drag performer once known as the Divine David, outspoken scourge of reactionary cant and liberal complacency alike, unique balancer of acerbic political analysis and off-camp showbiz pizzazz befitting his Blackpool upbringing.
Framing David as a version of Miss Jean Brodie has its own camp value, of course – fearless and magnetic, neurotic and narcissistic, the persona is a gift to a performer. But this framing is also deeply earnest. David really is an esteemed educator and has been for decades. In a society that still offers no assured guidance or support for those growing up queer, consigning many people to lives of trauma, abjection and despair, lone voices of observation, analysis and affirmation like David’s are vital sources of orientation and edification in a hostile world.
The Prime of Ms David Hoyle will be another platform for David’s teachings. It will also participate in informal educational structures that have recently emerged around queer cabaret. Every night, the show will feature different guest performers who have graduated from Carnesky’s Finishing School and the Duckie Homosexulist Summer School – vocational training programmes specifically tailored to young artists interested in the forms and career practice of alternative cabaret, subjects that receive scant attention within most established drama degrees.
The show will also put the overlap between teaching and performance centre stage by co-opting the formal vocabulary of the school Рassembly, hymns, lessons, prizegiving, help for Ms Hoyle from a classroom assistant (Warhol superstar manqu̩ Simone Simone) and a prefect (myself). And education will be its explicit subject. On the one hand, Ms Hoyle will consider the psychological, social and political consequences of our post-Victorian structures of schooling. On the other, she will propose some radical alternatives, including emotional and physical forms of education very different from those on offer in the conventional classroom.
Key to this is the engagement of the audience as present and active participants in a many-sided conversation of words, music, images, memories and fantasies, to a degree unusual even within a cabaret context. They will be invited to participate in singalongs and chime in from their seats – but also to take chalk to blackboard, to excavate buried personal experiences, to engage in group rituals. We hope the show will leave people fizzing with a renewed sense of the potential for discovery that is always within and around us. But we are also alert to the lures of straw-man arguments, the dangers of utopianism and the need always to question the guidance of even the most electrifying pedagogue. Not to leave room for a whisper of doubt would, after all, be bad education.
The Prime of Ms David Hoyle runs at Chelsea Theatre from September 14-25. More info here.
