Acclaimed theatre company The Wardrobe Ensemble, in co-production with Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Shoreditch Town Hall, will bring the The Scotsman Fringe First Award and The Stage Edinburgh Award winning hit production Education, Education, Education to London’s West End from 31 May to 29 June 2019 (press night is 5 June).
The Wardrobe Ensemble uses its singular style of irreverent humour and inventive theatricality to dissect education and responsibility at the dawn of Blair’s Britain in 1997. In Education, Education, Education audiences are thrown back to the 90s; the music, the fads and the icons as well as issues that remain pertinent to the 21st century experience.
The cast of Education, Education, Education will include: Tom Brennan (Paul McIntyre), Ben Vardy (Tim Pashley), Jesse Meadows (Susan Belltop-Doyle), Emily Greenslade (Emily Greenslade), James Newton (Tobias) and Tom England (Hugh Mills). Education, Education, Education has been devised by The Wardrobe Ensemble and directed by Jesse Jones and Helena Middleton. Further casting will be announced in due course.
Also in the creative team are designer Lucy Sierra, lighting designer Katharine Williams, sound designer Ben Grant, dramaturg Bea Roberts, associate sound designer Daniel Balfour and wardrobe supervisor Felicity Jones.
It’s May 1997. The iPhone doesn’t exist, no one knows who Harry Potter is, Titanic is on the shelves of every Blockbuster and we have just won Eurovision. Britain is the coolest place in the world.
“First a Eurovision win and now Tony’s our new Prime Minister. I can barely recognise this country; you know I actually saw people smiling on the train this morning.”
At the local secondary school it’s a different story. It’s the last week of term and Tobias, the new German language assistant has just arrived in the UK. While political change occurs outside of the classroom, a revolution slowly starts to take place within it. Tobias is greeted by a group of eccentric schoolteachers just trying to make it through the day, including Miss Belltop-Doyle who can’t control her year 10s and Mr Pashley who is trying to keep a confiscated Tamagotchi alive.
The show is described as a love letter to education in the 1990s and is jam-packed with hits from bands including Oasis, Katrina and the Waves and The Spice Girls, plus references to the Teletubbies, jokes about Take That and the Macarena.
Education, Education, Education is a co-production between The Wardrobe Ensemble, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, and Shoreditch Town Hall, presented in the West End by Trafalgar Theatre Productions and Eilene Davidson.
