By BRUCE DENNILL
Ms B-Haved / Directed by Natasha Sutherland / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
A compact, one-woman play, Ms B-Haved, written and performed by Sue Diepeveen, examines, with both humour and pathos, the lot of the modern teacher. Where teaching used to involve a relatively simple formula – follow a curriculum, shout a little where discipline is deserved, and be on hand to be everything from mentor to therapist to nurse to surrogate parent, thereby becoming a hugely influential and generally positive presence – it is now a minefield of political correctness and ever-shifting woke guidelines.
Diepeveen doesn’t dump all of that on the audience from the off. Rather, as Sally Burkett, a primary school teacher with some 30 years’ experience, she creates a narrator of goofy charm, given to uttering phrases that are also the hooks in popular songs and then singing them out loud in the privacy of her home office. She’s in said office because she has been suspended from school, for an offence hinted at in constantly updated WhatsApp message groups where school parents gossip about her, apparently having forgotten that she’s receiving their missives. The challenges of working from home – technological challenges, disconnection from learners on the other side of a computer screen and the loss of a community of like-minded professionals among them – are showcased with comic awkwardness before the script takes the audience into the backstory.
Curiously, when Diepeveen embodies Sally as the narrator – with a hint of a handful of autobiographical elements – she is more studied and married to the text, while when she switches to portraying the kids in her class or their variously problematic parents, all with different mannerisms and accents, she is natural and fluid, with Gary, an unfiltered nine-year-old who gets dropped off at school early every day, being particularly funny and memorable.
The play’s best moment underlines the seriousness of its themes; a moment when the vocational commitment of Sally as a dedicated, engaged, loving teacher is defied by the stiff strictness of a bewilderingly wide-ranging and ever-changing set of rules, largely defined by parents who now hold more power in the education space than qualified educators. Without giving it away, it is an interaction (imagined – there’s only ever one person on stage) that is stark, arresting … and heartbreaking.
The upshot of the whole piece is that, as in so many other areas of modern life, authenticity and sincerity have been almost completely devalued. Whoever is paying the bills has become the controlling authority and their unnuanced, often shouted opinions have become the constitution of the little kingdom in which they currently have influence. Here it is school parents; in the headlines, it’s the tech billionaires and the ignorant politicians. Here it is sniping, air-headed gossip in WhatsApp groups; outside of school, it’s the comment sections on stories that deserve informed analysis rather than knee-jerk vapidity. Either way, it’s profoundly depressing and quite obviously the basis for a future in which youngsters are almost never encouraged to think for themselves, and not given safe spaces to make mistakes as they try to find their way. Ms B-Haved at least underlines that, tangled up in the vagaries of the current systems, there are gifted, caring, witty people who cannot help but still care deeply, even if doing so often leaves them feeling bruised and betrayed.