Day 23: The Road to Mandalay, by John McGrath.

This is a musical written for schools in 2000, in response to a challenge by a group of headteachers to write a play for all of their schools to perform. The play came out of a series of workshops with the students, discussions with teachers and presumably a lot of research. The author states in an introduction that he encouraged the actors to research the history behind the roles they were playing. The script I have doesn't include the tunes to most of the songs (though one or two are indicated to be sung to existing tunes) but is otherwise complete including some very particular staging notes. Usually that's something I've not shied from complaining about, but in this case it was clearly part of a project designed to run as similarly as possible in each school that performed it (13 of the original 17 schools who approached him with the challenge initially).

The play centres around a meeting of the United Nations first drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, observed by a cynical and disenchanted group of modern-day children who pretty much rip apart every article to show how nearly every single one is still being violated today. It's a powerful lesson in modern world history post-WW2, which is certainly interesting for me. It's not something I was ever taught in school, and if I hadn't done GCSE History I'd never have got past WW1. I was very much of the opinion as a kid that I didn't need to know what was going on around me... we didn't have much in the way of Current Affairs classes and History lessons were mostly about wars, or ancient empires.

The style is clear and informative without being condescending. I know I learned a few things from reading, and it certainly has a place in any History, English or PSHE classroom. There's a scene switching between private and state school classrooms and both are exaggerated just enough not to entirely alienate the other, but just subtlely enough not to offend. Overall it's fun, engaging and educational, with a few twists of irony for the older and/or brighter kids (and the parents) and a little bit of suggested multimedia involvement to really bring the whole thing up to date. I'd have to say I'm impressed.