Class Enemy
By Nigel Williams
Review
This play was first performed at the Theatre Upstairs on 9 March 1978 and at
the Royal Court Theatre on 4 April, 1978. It is a contemporary play in prose
which consists of two acts.
The play is about six students gathered in a classroom. They seem to be
waiting for a teacher that never comes. They have destroyed everything at
sight. Once they’re bored, Iron orders they start giving lessons to each other.
First Nipper talks about his father who drinks, Sweetheart talks about sex,
Rack explains some gardening... The master comes in and takes Snatch away
and tells the class that there isn’t going to be a teacher. Nipper continues the
lesson talking about the Blacks in a racist way. Snatch comes back and is
received as a hero. He gives a lesson on breaking windows. Skylight teaches
on cookery. Sky-light and Iron begin a fight, the Master comes at that moment
and says they give up on them. Iron teaches self-defence. When someone
seems to be coming, the school bell rings, and school is over.
Class Enemy was written in times of the punk rock revolution yet it is still up
to date in content. They have nicknames which are a strong version of their
own names. Their vocabulary is vulgar, and the text is written as a
transcription for us to be able to penetrate their world and get to understand
them better. The door represents the division between them and the rest, who
don’t understand them, and don’t want to know anything about them.
Each character has burdens and characteristics which make them who they
are. Sweetheart is the most intelligent and reflexive. Racks is a tough boy.
Nipper is a xenophobe and racist boy. Iron wants to be a role-model to the
rest. To him, being strong and tough is very important, being broken like a
horse is pitiful. His motto is that you always have to fight back. He is also
sexist, but at the end, he just wants to be liked. He seems more violent as he
becomes more vulnerable. Sky-light is opposed to Iron’s authority and acts in
the most aggressive way as a teacher which might be why the rest aren’t
interested in what he has to say. Snatch is quite affable. Most of them have
had problems at home, such as an alcoholic father, and they seem to blame
those problems and society, in general, for their behaviour.
The students begin to give lessons to each other. They are impatient to learn,
but teachers are useless. They rebel against the system and create their own.
Violence is very important in the play. They rebel against the authority, which
in this case are the teachers. Yet, when they are giving the lessons
themselves, they realize the difficulty of the task. The master calls them
savages for fighting. This just means that they have to follow the system’s
rules like it or not.
Some have found connections with the plot of this play and works like the
Lord of the flies, where children play in an adult’s way to finally commit adult
atrocities. It is like they tried to behave like adults without being able to do it.
