Corpus Playroom
Dir: James Moran
Four Stars

“Oh. Wow. A play by Stephen Fry. That’ll be hilarious.” These were my first thoughts on reading the publicity for Latin! And, having discovered that the play dealt with paedophilic schoolteachers at a conservative English prep school, I had no doubt that the play would be funny. Light. Full of cheap laughs.

And Latin! did indeed deliver all the belly laughs that the audience had expected. Special highlights were Brookshaw (Tom Ovens) writing on the board as a punishment for misdemeanours: “no fuck” rather than “no tuck,” or “licked out by headmaster” (work it out). Will Hensher, as Mr Clarke, displayed mesmerising comic timing with lascivious lines such as: “The boy across the river has a bottom like a peach. I can’t swim. But he can…”

However, with such material, the play could so easily have been nothing more than a cheap, farcical caricature of perversion and boarding school life. Of course, there was some of this. After Brookshaw blackmails Clarke into coming to his rooms twice a week to “beat me for half an hour with a clothes hanger or wet towel,” he finishes with a demand that Clarke also bring a jar of peanut butter. More irritatingly, Clarke’s constant berating of his students during his lessons became frankly tedious towards the end of each scene.

But despite this, the play displayed an unexpected humanity. As someone who has been to just such a boarding school, I didn’t feel that the play particularly exaggerated the eccentricities of such an institution. Even more impressively, the perversions of the two schoolteachers, which extend to violating the back of the knees of a thirteen-year-old boy, are presented humanely, and understandingly. Whatever their failings, these two are humans, and their oddities are explained by their pasts.

This balance between the hilarious and the humane would not have been possible without perfectly believable and well-executed performances from the two actors. Never did one get that feeling, so common during student theatre, that we were watching young novices perform. When Hensher pretended to give a lesson with the audience standing in for the class, his concentration never broke and nor did he fall out of character, despite the fact that the conceit obviously involved interaction with the audience. Likewise Ovens’ catalogue of sexual perversions never seemed anything but perfectly sincere.

The Corpus Playroom is a difficult space to use: any flaw in acting or direction is shown up instantly. It is a credit to all involved in this performance that it worked perfectly: funny, absurd and yet moving.

Max Hayward