“What impact does corporal punishment leave? How should those who carry out corporal punishment deal with students who have experienced their infliction?” After being first staged at the Royal Court in 2018, this time a new production team with John Turner as Director brings The Cane by Mark Ravenhill to the Questors Theatre.
When hearing the theme, it's easy to assume that the story takes place in a school, but The Cane takes the audience into the home of a retiring deputy head teacher. Edward has been teaching for 45 years and is about to retire. His wife, Maureen, has organised a celebration with the school to wrap up his teaching career. At this time, their daughter Anna - who has not been in touch with them for a long time and who works in the education department, responsible for converting substandard schools into academies - returns home. She finds the window of the house has been broken with a brick and there is a large number of pupils gathered at the door, expressing their displeasure at Edward, all because he used to cane the pupils for corporal punishment.
The stage set-up is realistic with a touch of abstraction. Juliette Demoulin has not chosen to build a complete house on the stage, but has circled a living room with three huge wooden panels of different shapes. On one of the panels, there is a window, which, having been broken by the bricks, is now nailed shut by a couple of wood planks. There are also a few marks on the wall from an axe that Anna left when she was a child. The stage is decorated with a table, a few chairs, and small objects like a potted plant and a mirror. In Act Two, a ladder, mentioned several times in Act One, is added to the stage as a tool for climbing up to the attic. The lighting of the stage (John Green) is essentially a dull yellow colour at all times, like natural light shining into a home. No additional music is used throughout the play to set the scene or emphasise the mood, only ambient sounds that appear in the situation are used, such as the noisy voices of the students, and the sound of the doorbell (Russell Fleet).
Pamela Major (as Maureen), Sarah Keller (as Anna), and Robert Baker-Glenn (as Edward) portray their characters vividly and precisely as if the audience were watching a day in the life of their family. Although there are only the three of them on stage, everyone else they talk about seems real, whether it's the student at the door or the headmaster they always refer to, it always appears as if they're going to enter the stage at any moment.
Although the story revolves around the corporal punishment system of caning students, there are much more problematic issues in this piece than just corporal punishment itself. Edward is chauvinistic, disrespectful to his wife and daughter, and has a constant temper; Maureen is timid, thoughtless, and always looks down on her daughter; and Anna, the daughter who grows up in this environment, has little affection for her parents, is headstrong and quite extreme. What was supposed to be a preparation for a retirement celebration, ends up with the family hurting each other, leaving behind a mess that cannot be fixed. This mess is not only caused by the fact that Edward used to apply corporal punishment to his students under the system of that time, but also because of the couple's incompetent behaviour and parenting manner.
As the conflicts gradually pile up in this piece, the state of the family's life over the past few decades unfolds in the dialogue between the three, bringing these characters to life while ensuring overall coherence and plausibility. However, because it focuses on the chaos of the family, all three characters are quite unlikable. Instead of being a critique of the corporal punishment system, it's more of a judgement made for individuals. When the enforcer of the corporal punishment system is portrayed as someone like Edward, it is hard not to feel that he deserves what he gets when he finally gets the consequences of being punished, even though it can be felt in some moments that he is not purely an incompetent teacher. On the other hand, when a generally good person is taken as the implementer of a system of corporal punishment, there would be a greater sense of dislocation and would make one more likely to feel and reflect on both the system and the person. But that will be another story.
The Cane, as it is now, is already a very complete work. Whether the main discussion is about the system or the family environment, it has a very meaningful focus.
The Cane runs at The Questors Theatre until 23rd November 2024. For more information and tickets, you can follow the link here.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4*)
Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | photography by Robert Vass
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