Director: Dominic Hedges
Author: The Cast
A rundown school. Teachers locked in conflict. A boy who won’t say anything. No, it’s not the premise of a mid-1970s children’s ITV drama, though it might well be. Instead, this adaptation of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener places the power firmly within its child-led cast by interrogating, if obscurely, the pressures placed on the modern education system.
Ms Delefortrie (Holly Delefortrie – all characters/actors share the same name) is the new teaching assistant for the isolation group of students, housed in a crumbling Portakabin on the edge of the school. In conflict with Tim Heath’s old-fashioned teacher (one of the best performances of the night, truly capturing that old fashioned wicked glint straight out of Grange Hill) and her troublesome students, Ms Delefortrie attempts to keep control of her life and classroom whilst interrogating the mystery of young Thomas (Thomas Clark), who refuses to say anything except ‘I would prefer not to’.
The premise of Melville’s short story does not map exactly onto the school setting, leading the creative team to include a modelling subplot and multiple references to Covid to flesh out the contemporary setting and concerns, but allows the young cast to explore themes of isolationism, pressure, the failing school system and its response to students-in-need. It also lends the tale an enjoyably old-fashioned strangeness, as this boy from nowhere refuses to engage with the regularity of his classmates, baffling his teacher. Add in some different hairstyles and a touch of CSO and it could be an episode of The Tomorrow People, or The Demon Headmaster. Children are provided with fewer and fewer chances to be social commentators and to creep their audience out, and The Kind Refuser rectifies this in spades.
The cast is also as strong as you could hope for from untrained child actors—again, part of what likens the story to children’s television. Strongest in the young cast are Thomas Clark, whose uncanny quietness and stillness make up for when we cannot hear him, and Anton Wild, who has the best comic timing and runs away with all the jokes.
Both Delefortrie and Heath shine as the adults, Delefortrie showing a convincing performance of a life spiralling out of control and Heath being enjoyably unsympathetic. Unfortunately, we never dig deep enough into any of these characters, and many plot elements remain unresolved or seem to stop halfway between being fully fleshed out and merely motifs, again adding to that uncanny quality across the whole piece.
Another element of this is the uneven staging, which has lights flaring to meaningfully indicate something (though quite what is up to the audience’s imagination) and synth music taken from an episode of Press Gang. These merely add to the intentional-or-not off-kilter effect of the show, however, and are not to its detriment.
Intentional or not, The Kind Refuser brings to mind a lost era of children’s drama. It has much to say about what children must deal with today, even if it vacillates between shouting about it or leaving it as subtext. And it even stars that most unlikely of modern children’s toys, the Rubik’s Cube.
Runs until 28 October 2022
