Thirty seconds into this play, the main character, German language assistant Tobias, asks the sound technician to play Back For Good by Take That. This surprised me—breaking the fourth wall risked detaching the audience from the storyline before it had even begun. Instead, it created an immediate bond between the audience and Tobias, who drew empathetic laughs almost from his opening line.

“Education, education, education” is what Tony Blair asserted were his three priorities in 1996, in advance of the general election. The play transpires on the day of his anointment as Prime Minister in May 1997, and it contrasts the unbridled joy of the more optimistic teachers with the ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ cynicism of others. Certainly, the audience aligned with the latter mindset—every mention of Blair’s promised £3 billion injection into the education system was met with derisive chuckles.

The plot brims with chaos, set on the year 11 cohort’s last day before exam leave. We see fights between students, fights between teachers, fights between students and teachers. A near-death experience is prevented from being a full-death experience only by a well-placed bouncy castle. The PE teacher endures most of the stages of grief over a student’s murdered Tamagotchi. There is a rather random bout of interpretive dance.

“My cheeks hurt afterwards from grinning throughout”

All this is punctuated by rambling monlogues from Tobias, whose casting felt spot on—Rob Monteiro personified the overenthusiastic, bumbling teaching assistant. Not all of the characters were so likeable, though, and Finn Cullen and Betty Blythe played far less endearing roles to great effect. Mia Glencrose expertly embodied the delusional visionary headmaster, and Amenie Groves was a convincing well-intentioned but feeble English teacher. Another standout was Ameer Morshed, playing a student, who was central to some of the most comedic scenes with several exaggerated, again quite random, impersonations of King Arthur.

Set at a school, the play acted as a nostalgia trip for most of the audience. A lot of the laughs felt like knowing laughs, as the well-spirited (and in smatterings, quite tipsy) audience related to the students and their misdemeanours. The music was well chosen, serving as a portal back to the nineties, the end of the Golden Age of pop music.

The production is rough around the edges: characters were called by incorrect names, props were dropped several times, and actors occasionally broke character. But the whole cast and crew are freshers, who deserve plenty of credit for what is, for many of them, their first stab at acting at university.

Most importantly, the play is funny. My cheeks hurt afterwards from grinning throughout. It is light-hearted and fun and all the other words you use to describe something that is not intended to be taken too seriously. This really isn’t a play for those who want theatre to intellectually stimulate them. But that was fine by me; at 11pm, I don’t want a play to spiral me into internal political, moral, or existential debate. I want to laugh, and smile, and reminisce, and this play delivered all three, as best I’ve seen any play in Cambridge do.