This is the third and final play of the Family triple-bill. A retiring teacher is visited by a former pupil (though he's not recognised as such) late at night. The younger man pretty much entirely fails to get to the point and eventually is kicked out at the point he starts trying to give a generous donation to the retirement fund.
As a play, it feels as though it's left hanging somewhat and nobody has really achieved anything. That said, it did send me rather forcefully back to my own English teacher, for whom I had 5 years of mutual hatred for apparently no reason at all. I still have issues and scars - I'm sure she was partly to blame for my loss of interest in reading as an adult, but perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, as it did lead to my working ever harder in Speech & Drama classes (which on occasional blissful terms took me out of *her* class!) and thus my drama crit saved me from a fate (well, grade) worse than a C in English Literature at GCSE. This teacher's response? "It just goes to show, doesn't it... how crap the rest of the country must be". She'll remain nameless, for her sake, but I wonder what she would make of this blog, and of my ongoing journey to becoming an actor. I don't know if she's even still around.
I don't think I could thank her for anything she taught me, and that's rare in a teacher (in all the wrong ways). From the age of 11 she mostly taught us that fantasy and sci-fi were worthless, that EVERYTHING is eventually about sex, and that anything she said was not to be questioned... and that those who didn't fit in were worthless too. My questions and comments when asked were so at odds to hers she at one point skimmed past my raised hand saying "I won't ask (her), she doesn't have a thought in her head".
And perhaps that's the point of the play - I imagine most people have a teacher who said something or did something once that made a huge impression, and we all wonder at some point whether we were remembered. I went back to visit both of my secondary schools a few years after I left each one, for different reasons... the class at CLSG who I had been a sort of form buddy to were now doing their GCSEs... and I was welcomed with a gaggle of hugs. Most of my teachers remembered me then, and I found the same at Mill Hill where I'd done my A-levels. For the latter I was even invited back to the staffroom, a thoroughly bizarre experience which left me spending almost an entire period talking to my German teacher in what was left of my language skills and almost not getting round all the physics teachers as I'd hoped to do (since I was nominally there to get some help and feedback on a final project for university).
Once again, I've responded to the play with anecdotes. Some plays really make you think about specifically what is happening on stage, the exact story they are telling, but this being open-ended allows the audience (or at least the reader) to think about the more general story, and their own.
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