How, using a small number of actors, can you represent a high school’s phys ed classes on stage? Given the play’s title, shouldn’t we expect the set to be the school’s gymnasium? Through a cunning ploy, you don’t, and it’s not. 

It’s the PE teachers’ staff room, where the two of them mooch around, while mobs of kids notionally (and occasionally noisily) run about on the playground outside (or in the gym?), playing whatever game they’ve been told to play, quite unsupervised apart from being shouted at now and then, from the corridor, or through the window with a megaphone. “Sort yourselves into four teams, representing four countries, Asia, Pacific, Maori and Pakeha!” Oh well. 

Hautapu High School, wherever that may be, as a low decile school, may well find it hard to attract and keep high-quality teachers, but Laurie (Phil Grieve), its head PE teacher, is blatantly lazy, irresponsible, cynical, crude, boozing and gambling (by phone, and usually losing), unfit, and seemingly incompetent. King Log rather than King Stork. He also blocks any effort by his capable though unambitious junior, Pat (Adrian Hooke), to behave any differently, to the exasperation of the tough principal, Viv Cleaver (Vivien Bell), who is genuinely trying to turn her school, and him, around. 

Enter a young student teacher, Annie (Rhema Sutherland), who is not only an outstanding up-and-coming athlete, and bright, and eager to work in practice with the disciplinary regimen she’s been trained in at teachers’ college. She’s also a born-again Christian, pledged to teetotalism and pre-marital chastity.

Once she gets over her initial keenness to fit in, Annie’s bound to get into clashes with Laurie. Being challenged, and bested by her, not only with press-ups, but even in arm-wrestling (oh, the shame of it!), he finds a very harsh way of hitting back at her. Having supervised her teaching in a Biology class, and heard her declare that Evolution and Creationism were of equal merit as theories, he can give her a ‘FAIL’ for ‘Content’. (“You can teach that in a church school, or one of those crazy charter schools, but you can’t in a state school!”). A career-crushing disaster for her?

As in Armstrong’s previous comedy, The Motor Camp, there are plenty more plot-twists to come; indeed, they go on twisting up to the last minute. And all four of the characters turn out to be more complex, and humanly interesting, as situations and stresses change. You’re lured into assuming you’ve got these characters typed, then get some surprises, with more to come. Plot and character developments effectively interact. 

Alas, I have late-middle-aged ears, and while this production is generally admirable, there are some bits of dialogue I can’t grasp. Vivien Bell, playing the (willfully?) hard-faced, steely-eyed principal, is always crystal clear vocally. Phil Grieve (Laurie) is a few times too gruff to be easily understood. Adrian Hooke (Pat) and Rhema Sutherland (Annie) both have good stage-voices, yet sometimes, because of speaking cross-stage, or too quietly, their lines get lost (for me at least). Speaking slightly downstage, and keeping up the projection, should fix that; also pausing during audience-laughs.

Otherwise, Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s pace-control is fine, and the flow-on from one episode to another quite smooth, with the passing of time between them indicated by costume changes and small variations to the dressing of the set.

The set itself, designed by Dennis Hearfield, gets the ambience authentic-seeming, for a school staff room, with plenty of clutter, and the suggestion of a corridor upstage. 

This is a capable production of a clever play, and deserves to do well. 

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