Teechers
About the play
Join Gail, Hobby and Salty, three fifth form students who, through their end of term play, tell the hilarious story of an idealistic new teacher in his perilous first days inside a local comprehensive school.
‘Certainly fun! Inventive and well-drilled’
— WhatsonStage
History of Teechers
“I don’t suppose that it will come as any surprise that my play TEECHERS is based on my personal experience as a drama teacher at Minsthorpe High School, West Yorkshire, between 1979-83. I had written about the education system in 1981 with a play called E.P. A. (Educational Priority Area), but I think that I was too close to the subject matter for it to be in anyway objective. It was only with the distance of time that I was able to assess my years as a drama teacher and wor4k out what I wanted to say about the Comprehensive education system.
When I became Artistic Director of Hull Truck in 1984, the onus fell on me to supply plays for the company to perform and after the success of UP N UNDER, I felt the palpable pressure to produce new comedies which would be cost effective and attractive to theatre audience here in Hull. We needed to focus on a popular shared experience to attract people to come to the theatre and school life was obviously something that everyone had in common. Hull Truck was very poorly funded back then, so much so, that I agreed to write TEECHERS for £100. The planted premiered at the Edinburgh Festival where it sold out, so it was quite a good investment for the company.
In TEECHERS I decided that I would return to a style of theatre which I had began investigating when I was teaching at Minsthorpe, namely; story telling theatre and multi-role playing. This had two advantages, one was it was very cost effective, and secondly it allowed me to draw on a number of differing theatre styles which I had picked up during my years at Bretton Hall College training to be a Drama Specialist and my time associated with the Workshop Theatre, and especially Professor Mike Patterson at Leeds University where, after my MA, I was engaged in PhD research.
Much of the subject matter in the play is based entirely on my own experience, and when Nixon leaves Whitewall at the end of the play-within-a-play, to join St Georges, I was almost certainly reflecting on my own time in teaching, and my eventual departure to run a theatre company in Hull that I had never heard of.
At the heart of TEECHERS is the very real assertion that the arts, and especially drama, should form an essential part of the school curriculum. It also attempts to demonstrate the effect that exposure to the arts has on young people. The conceit is that Gail, Salty and Hobby have invented the play TEECHERS, which the audience is watching, and ipso facto, during their drama lessons they have become skilled and analytical story tellers and observers, able to comment on society as they live through it.
I was very fortunate that I had a terrific drama teacher in Peter Dickens when I was at Minsthorpe, and this introduced me to literature, and to the theatre in a serious way. I suppose in TEECHERS I was partly articulating my own journey and pointing up just how life changing an involvement in theatre could be. I could have never imagined, however, that Drama in schools would become so marginalised over time, and that my play would have more relevance now than it did when it was written over thirty years ago. This in itself is very satisfying for a playwright, but at the same time the fact that things have got worse is a cause for real concern. Whilst there is constant talk of levelling up opportunities for young people in our schools, the popularity of the play, especially the online version, illustrates to me that we still have Comprehensive schools full of Gails, Salty and Hobbys, and they deserve the opportunity to express themselves through the arts.
The essence of TEECHERS, and perhaps part of its attraction, is that the actors and director have the same resources available to them, that a drama teacher has in their classroom or studio; namely, a desk, some chairs and a massive imagination to work with. This open invite for the production team to use its imaginative resources can be very attractive and means that new productions have the potential to bring something new to the play.”
- John Godber
Watch ‘Teechers’ online with Black Eyed Theatre
Shortlisted for the Music & Drama Education Awards 2021 for ‘Outstanding Drama Education Resource’, Blackeyed Theatre’s acclaimed 2018 production of John Godber’s Teechers is available to license for the 2020/21 academic year, along with a whole range of talks and Q&As with the cast and artistic team who put the production together, including an exclusive interview with John Godber himself. In all, the pack provides over five hours of syllabus-related content.