There is every sign that the three girls are going be trouble, whether it's their scowls of terminal boredom, the sod-you slouches, or the desperate hair-styles ranging from a cheap head-in-the-sink-red-dye-disaster to pink fluffy accessories that look like radioactive chicks.
Stuck in a bottom-of-the-league state-school, they are prepared like a pit of pubescent sharks for the arrival of the new stammering supply teacher, whose attempts to win them over are filled with carefully angled barbs for any Ofsted representatives sitting in the audience.
In true John Godber style, this is a pretension-smashing production, which fights against the league-table-led tyranny of measuring pupils' abilities by numbers, and argues that a more creative arts-based approach might defuse classroom apathy.
His revival of Thick as a Brick, broadcasts the right message at the right time to a state-education system in which truancy is so rife it could become a GCSE subject, but this is not enough to validate a play in which simplicity degrades into the obvious, and feeling suppurates into sentimentality.
The familiar storyline carries distinct echoes of To Sir With Love or the Dead Poets' Society, starting with Mary Clifford's introduction to her three unimpressed pupils, and ends with her inspiring them (with the indirect help of Robbie Williams) to modern dance.
The play's problems are pinpointed by her flighty involvement with one pupil's ex-convict dad, where the verbal foreplay seems to revolve around his educational inadequacies. The low-level of education among prisoners is without doubt an important subject, but here it jars, since it feels that Godber has reduced this love story from theatre to a piece of polemic on legs.
Indeed, it is only - ironically - Godber's snappy and enjoyable production with the Hull Truck Theatre Company that fleshes out his characters from pawns in a much-rehearsed argument to people. Together with John Pattison's music, the cast brings enough attitude to the story to rise above the stereotyping.
The motto that emerges from the script is: "Imagination, imagination, imagination." What a shame, then, about the overload of simplification, simplification, simplification.
Thick As A Brick
