Still Loving School After 30 Years A Modern Re-Telling of Edgy Classroom Drama Class Enemy Transports a South London Comprehensive to Sarajevo.

By Neil Cooper

WHEN Nigel Williams wrote Class Enemy in 1978, the south London classroom it was set in was brimming with revolution. Punk rock had motivated every lower-stream streetwise urchin to stand up to the authorities . There was a tribal warfare at play as well, between punks and Teds, revived mods and rockers, and all the other youth movements that provided an off-the-peg sense of belonging.

Class Enemy was one of those plays that every teenager in the late 1970s knew about, even if they hadn’t seen it. This might have had something to do with the presence of a young Phil Daniels, at the time on the verge of becoming every casting director’s juvenile delinquent of choice, in the lead role. Like Barrie Keefe’s similarly classroom-set Gotcha, which had appeared two years earlier, Class Enemy captured a generation about to explode.

Thirty years on, what might have ended up as a state-of-the- nation period piece has been dragged bang up-to-date by Bosnian theatre director Haris Pasovic, whose adaptation of Williams’s play for the tellingly named East West Theatre Company re-imagines Williams’s original for a very contemporary setting that is a long way from an all-boys comprehensive school in South London.

“To be honest, it’s not that unusual, ” Williams says of Pasovic’s take on his play. “I get approached by people wanting to do Class Enemy all the time. It’s just been done in Brazil, and there was an all-female production as well. The English theatre is a very strange institution, so it doesn’t get done much here, but it’s very nice that Johnny Foreigner has come good with it.”

He’s joking, of course, but given that Pasovic’s Sarajevo-set production has a far more explicit tribal breakdown, the arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic a few weeks ago gives Class Enemy an extra edge. In this production, the threat of violence is more pronounced . Williams may have been on the verge of 30 when he wrote Class Enemy but, as with many of his generation, he was always partial to a spot of parttime armchair rebellion. “I loved punk when it came along, ” says a man who turned 60 earlier this year. “It was the same when I was at university in 1968, even though I was a bit of a swot. A lot of rules got broken. It was a very revolutionary time in British society. ” Following its original production, Williams continued to divide his time between writing for stage and TV, as well as concentrating on novels. His children’s TV drama, Johnny Jarvis, tapped into a similar zeitgeist as Class Enemy, and an adaptation of Lord Of The Flies followed. More recently, Williams penned the TV film, Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren . It’s Class Enemy, however, that still captures a global imagination.

“There are times I sort of resent it, ” Williams admits, “but after 30 years, it’s a play that still offends some people, and seems to have this strange counter-life across the world, so it must be doing something right.”

Class Enemy is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre from tonight to Saturday.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

(c) 2008 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.