Ouch! A whacking great lecture about discipline

The Cane (Royal Court Theatre, London) Verdict: Punishing stuff ★★✩✩✩

THE Royal Court Theatre has a history of punishing Christmas plays. Lucy Kirkwood’s post-apocalyptic guilt fest The Children two years ago was a classic example.

Now the wonderful Nicola Walker (pictured) finds herself in one of these festive hand-wringers: this time Mark Ravenhill’s drama about caning in schools.

You could be forgiven for thinking the issue was dead after corporal punishment was banned in 1986. But the play is in line with the ‘progressivist’ urge to sanitise the past as much as the present. So we find ourselves in the suburban home of a deputy head (Alun Armstrong) who is due for retirement but is besieged by pupils protesting that he (lawfully) administered the cane in the Eighties. Walker is his estranged teacher-daughter who comes as judge, jury and jailer.

If you have something serious to say, Walker is definitely the woman to say it for you. Her hooded eyes have an implacable, searching quality and do not readily blink. But the part Ravenhill has written for her has the emotional colour of an Ofsted report. Parroting platitudes about ‘best practice’, she talks to her parents like they’re clients at a tribunal, advising her father that he should apologise for historical wrongdoings. The father’s situation is presumably intended to echo other supposed historical wrongs that rage on Twitter, but at no point does any member of the mob make it inside to state their case. Looking like Wallace from Wallace And Gromit, Armstrong brings warmth to this role, but the script offers no indication of the popularity from which he has fallen. Maggie Steed as his snarling wife is away with the fairies and has to perform a spurious feminist awakening to her husband’s supposed bullying late on. I couldn’t see what pleasure the actors were taking from their roles and began to wonder if we, the audience, weren’t being subjected to theatrical chastisement, too.