Common Road School is a down-at-heel secondary in the north. It has never won anything, except bottom place in the league tables two years in a row. The kids have given up on the school and the school has given up on the kids. The headmaster likes the place best when they've all gone home. Only the drama teacher believed that "you've got to live each day as if it were your last" - and he has just died of a stress-related heart attack.
His replacement is Mary Clifford, who has been out of teaching for 15 years. Within minutes of her arrival she is reminded why she left. Mary has got the dregs - Stacey, Kerry and Maggie, three 16-year-olds going on 160 who have no self-esteem, no motivation, no hope and no future.
John Godber's latest piece to hit London isn't so much a play as a sparky, passionate piece of propaganda about why we need arts teaching in school. It is quite the most enjoyable piece of propaganda I've ever sat through but, in an evening in which the message is what counts most, theatre plays second fiddle to theatre in education.
It begins extremely well. Mary's frustrating attempts to deal with Stacey, Kerry and Maggie - who blank her out with a mixture of insolence and indifference - ring completely true. But Godber has a sentimental streak a mile wide and it is not long before gritty reality turns to fairy tale as Mary starts hitting it off not just with the kids but also with Stacey's hard-man dad.
A weekend in London watching Pina Bausch and Robbie Williams (not, regrettably, on the same bill) proves that even the most hopeless cases can be redeemed by art. And the pompous old headmaster - an idiot you feel sure would have been relieved of his duties long ago - suddenly decides that dance and drama deserve their place in the curriculum.
Optimism has a place in our thinking about education and fantasy has its place on stage, but here everything is so sugar-coated that the real problems facing girls, teachers and the educational system are merely glossed over in favour of a happy-ever-after ending.
This exceptionally well-acted show is a musical - not of the West End song-and-dance variety, more Bertolt Brecht meets Willy Russell. Composer John Pattison's music is excellent and as a lyricist Godber sometimes hits harder than he does as a dramatist. Kerry's lament of a home life made up solely of snacks in front of the TV is both funny and true.
Until February 3. Box office: 020-8858 7755.
