"People don't do things like that" is the famous last line of Hedda Gabler. You could also apply it to Judith Johnson's play, a seemingly simple but intricately argued thriller about the way our education system fails children and teachers.
When Ken, a teacher for over two decades, is pushed to the edge by a teenager - no better or worse than many of the hundreds of disruptive kids who have passed through his classroom - you are inclined to the view that people simply don't do things like that. It is a mark of the power of Johnson's drama that, by the end, you wonder why things like that do not happen more often.
Interweaving monologues with dramatic action, Johnson takes us into the minds of four different people. There is Ken, whose career and life are destroyed when a charge of assault is brought against him by Wayne, a bright, black teenager disaffected by the school system. Wayne's mother Yvonne loves him and neglects him in equal measure, and her job as a lap dancer makes her a very different mother to that of bright, middle-class Jessica, the kind of achieving student that schools must attract to bolster their performance.
Johnson's play has not only sly wit - a siege turns into a kind of vicarage tea party - it is very cunningly constructed. Its driving narrative makes you want to know what will happen next, and it constantly undercuts the stereotypes it presents, confronting issues of race and class head-on. Your sympathies are constantly shifted from one character to another. Sometimes you are with Ken, understanding his motives despite the stupidity of his actions, seeing Wayne through his eyes as the kind of insolent, deliberately blank teenager that you want to smack. Sometimes you see things through Wayne's eyes, the misunderstood kid, whose potential is destroyed by the rigidity of the school system and teachers like Ken under pressure to get results. John Burgess's production is a little miracle of economy and the acting is in the premier division. Well worth a trip to the wrong end of the King's Road to demonstrate that good new writing can blossom in less fashionable locations.
· Until March 22. Box office: 0870 990 8454.
