First Bill: Our Class

From the plays I have seen on this London trip and my previous one (this past July), the National Theatre has three main strands of focus in its programming. There are rigorous investigations of classic plays such as Phedre and All’s Well That Ends Well, premieres of new English plays such as The Habit of Art (see the previous post) and The History Boys, adaptations of foreign-language plays such as the play we were at this afternoon, Our Class. There is an astonishing range of cultures and experiences on display – not only through the material itself, but also through the overlapping ensembles that have been assembled to make theatre happen. Three theatres running multiple productions in repertory: at the National, it really does begin to feel like All the World’s a Stage.


Our Class is a grueling three hour examination of a group of people linked by circumstance as they grow from kids in class, to teenagers who undergo rites of passage, young adults who become aware of the social and political changes happening around them, men and women who mark each other with love and tragedy, parents who give everything to their children, widows and widowers who find second lease in life, grandparents who start to withdraw from the families they have built and lost, and lonely souls who confront the final transition into the great beyond.


The unique sociohistorical lens of 20th-century Poland as a setting means of course that the play is a ruthless inquiry into the effects of the Soviet invasion, then the Nazi “liberation,” then the Holocaust, and then the aftermath of war on a common group of people. These are class mates who support, betray, save, murder, manipulate, rape, protect and destroy each other, and at the end of the play, are left to silently confront what it is the world has made them do to one another as they sit on the chairs that signify their graves in a final tableau recalling the great last act of Our Town. The natural dramaturgical subtext is nature versus nurture: are we who we are made, or are we what we’ve made of ourselves? For this particular author, the one experience that eludes the entire group of people is that of self-knowledge and therefore, self-determination. We see that we are creatures who are blindly reacting to personal, political and karmic stimuli, that our choices are dictated by life and by necessity, that our actions are inherently reactions, and all that is left in the end is the silence of reflection. The overbearing pressure of lived experience was embodied in a stunning scenographic moment, in which a large and previously immobile steel roof hanging over the playing space is slowly lowered onto the actors beneath them. This is a daring and devastating new play, and one that I hope will find its way across the Atlantic to us.


(posted by Ed)