"O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!" read out our teacher solemnly. And, O, how we smirked.
It is the early 90s and I am sitting in A-level English Literature. Every single line of Antony and Cleopatra is painstakingly explained to me. Assiduous fellow pupils are scribbling these explanations on every white space on the page. We have been through the same process with Mansfield Park. The same fate awaits a Canterbury tale or two. And, after that, exactly the same sort of line-by-line exegesis will be visited on Seamus Heaney and Waiting for Godot.
In last week's Observer, Cambridge-educated, former National Theatre director Richard Eyre expressed concern that schools were not doing enough to instil an appreciation of the arts in pupils. Elsewhere in the article, Tony Hall, CEO of the Royal Opera House, suggests: "Once a year there should be a trip to the theatre, ballet or opera for every child." As a passionate devotee of theatre, an avid reader, an enjoyer of classical music and a happy gallery-goer, you'd think I'd be pleased that someone was taking this stand. Instead, something about the idea makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Is simply marching children into theatres enough to make them appreciate the experience? Are young people really best served by being treated as a single mass, to be herded, irrespective of personal tastes, into one show per year? No one would dream of treating adults in this way. What happened to New Labour's "choice" agenda? A one-size-fits-all approach to culture is as wrong-headed as simple philistinism. And surely children could be put off a perfectly plausible future enjoyment of theatre by simply being taken and told, "This is theatre. This is good. Enjoy this." Being led to a building by a teacher does not a sense of entitlement make half so much as it engenders resentment.
Beyond this, there is the way that the British education system continues to treat plays as if they are novels or poems. On a recent Guardian arts blog, people listed books they'd never read. Various plays by Shakespeare cropped up and I was left marvelling at the idea that people thought they ought to "read" Shakespeare. Of course, there's nothing wrong with reading Shakespeare, but as an experience it is significantly different to seeing it performed. Except that in Britain, thanks to the way that Shakespeare is taught - like a novel - there is an unwonted sense that watching his work performed is somehow "cheating"; like watching Jane Eyre on telly instead of reading it. None of this is to disparage teachers or teaching. There are some phenomenal teachers who will irrevocably change hundreds of lives for the better. These methods simply reflect a far wider culture.
But the way that plays are taught - as literature - impacts enormously on the way we view theatre in Britain. It is perhaps significant that every director of the National Theatre since Olivier has been Cambridge educated, despite the fact that Cambridge, famously, does not have a theatre studies department, but does have a three-hour finals paper on tragedy. Is it any wonder, then, that our predominant theatrical mode is that of the director "serving" the text? Or why a majority of our - predominantly Oxford-educated, strangely - senior critics huff and puff, albeit with a certain degree of self-awareness, when directors like Katie Mitchell refuse to play ball? If anything, contrary to Eyre's assertion, it seems that theatre in this country might, if anything, benefit from being taken even further out of our education system.
